ART CITIES:N.York-Scott Kahn

Rooted in his everyday life and experiences, Scott Kahn’s enigmatic landscapes, portraits, and dreamscapes blend real and surreal elements. The artist has remained committed to a figurative mode of expression over the course of more than five decades, using a distinctive formal language to achieve a nuanced and poetic rendition of the simultaneous splendor and mundanity of the world around him. His surfaces are meticulously constructed according to precise geometries and chromatic and spatial relationships wherein the artist employs perspective and light to establish an illusory sense of depth that underscores the resonances imparted by the recurring cast of people, places, and symbols.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Focusing on the Scott Kahn’s singular landscapes, a genre that is central to his practice, the exhibition “Silent Night” brings together a significant group of new and recent paintings alongside works spanning the previous twenty-five years that explore Kahn’s most enduring motifs.

Over more than five decades, Kahn has maintained a commitment to a representational mode of expression, using a distinctive formal language to achieve a nuanced and poetic rendition of the simultaneous splendor and mundanity of the world around him. Rooted in his everyday life and experiences, Kahn’s enigmatic landscapes blend real and surreal elements. Many read as near facsimiles of lived experience shot through with electric color or ghostly shadows: billowing clouds that seem to come alive, ominous moonscapes, bare trees electrified by unexpected hues, and picture windows that open onto worlds both known and unknown. Seasons turn and day recedes into night, change often sweeping across a single canvas.

Though many of Kahn’s landscapes depict places he has lived and traveled—comprising, as he has called it, a visual diary—they transcend literal representation of those locales. Kahn suspends the ever-changing cycles and seasons of the natural world at precisely selected moments in time, composing these affective environments using his own well-honed pictographs for elements such as trees, clouds, and grass that are legible as both the thing itself and a universal stand-in.

In Kahn’s newest paintings, he plays with perspective in a way that subtly destabilizes the viewer’s experience. “Melt Off” (2026) features a curving horizon that reinforces the windswept feeling of blowing trees and trailing clouds as the winter snow recedes. Bright daylight slips into dusk across the surface of the work, and a path seemingly to nowhere trails off into the twilit terrain. Likewise, “Fall into Winter” (2024) pictures a seasonal shift—the vivid colors of fall ceding to the more subdued tones of winter. The painting lacks a horizon line, collapsing both time and space to conjure the feeling of indeterminacy that frequently ac-companies such passages. In The Basement (2025), waving red, blue, and green trees, their branches barren, encircle a centrally placed window that looks out onto an endless verdant wood. Based on a recurring dream of the artist’s childhood home, the work seems to merge interior and exterior space.

Windows appear frequently in Kahn’s body of work, often hovering in space or placed incongruously within a landscape as a harbinger of both the uncertainty and the opportunity of a new chapter. “Leap from the Balcony” (2003) features a golden sunset glimpsed through a wood frame that separates the space of the viewer from an expanse of sea and sky. In “The Leaves Have Fallen” (2024/2025), a tree bifurcates the canvas, creating two distinct compositions—at left, a sunny fall day and at right, a dark winter night—that mirror each other while a latticed window frame floats in the space between.

Another recurrent motif, the full moon is present in the background of a number of works as a sort of omen for the scene laid out beneath. In “Lunar Eclipse II” (2008/2009), the red orb hangs heavy in the night sky, positioned above a seemingly endless field of barren trees that balefully take on its unnatural, glowing hue. By contrast, “Blue Moon” (2021) presents a placid, daytime vista in which thin red cirrus clouds gently surround the outsized sphere. Here, Kahn cannily plays with the chromatic implications of this phrase, presenting a moonscape that pulls the viewer into another realm.

Photo: Scott Kahn, Melt Off, 2026, Oil on linen, 48 1/4 x 56 inches (122.6 x 142.2 cm) ), Signed and dated recto; signed, titled, dated, and inscribed verso, © Scott Kahn, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/9-17/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/