Wyatt Kahn, A Bar (2022), via Eva Presenhuber
On view this month at Eva Presenhuber in New York, a body of new works by artist Wyatt Kahn continues the artist’s engagement with shaped canvases and complex forms, here turning his compositions towards a series of geometric and serpentine forms.Â
Kahn’s work draws much on irregularity and structure, using the canvas as a medium in its own right to create shifting, swirling wall pieces in three dimensions, assembled into compositions as abstract as they are connotative.  In the work A Bar, geometries of semi-circular apertures, cut out of square enclosures, accumulate upon a dense surface, like seared-through coasters or half-empty glasses left in disarray on a countertop. Or Untitled (Him and Us), which reprises a motif familiar to Kahn’s lexicon―a vertical body articulated through the accumulation of a stack of thin, rib-like bands at its core, amplified, wrapped, even embraced by rigid U-shaped arms that lace over and under the primary ground. Anthropomorphizing metaphors arise easily, as he playfully straddles the line between geometric abstraction and figuration, between painting and sculpture, all the while intervening in each category’s respective and entangled historical lineages and discourses.
Wyatt Kahn, Untitled (2022), via Eva Presenhube
The artist’s elaboration of the shaped canvas has been a long and evolving mode throughout the course of his work, twisting the work through both the dialogues of modern painting and sculpture simultaneously, revisiting the mediums as both shared and independent fields open to cross-pollination and evolution. In Knots & Figures, a new series of oil paintings on canvas, elaborated alongside corresponding or related shaped canvases, compress the latter’s dimensional play within a single pictorial plane. In their complex overlays of lines, forms, colors, and strokes, Kahn’s oil paintings are like aggregates of the additive and subtractive procedures that inform his wall works, reverse-engineered to redeploy these operations in a purely pictorial register. Here, figure and ground hover and supplant one another fluidly, suspended at the surface that both recedes and advances in depthless space. With these forms’ sculptural analogues in mind, for Kahn, painting can never reassume its static place as the medium of illusion, nor can it simply perform as the medium of flatness.
Wyatt Kahn, Coming Out of the Clay (2022), via Eva Presenhuber
These works are accompanied by a new body of work, high-relief, nearly free-standing sculpture in a new series of small, cast bronzes. While his sculpture has taken monumental dimension in his 2021 public works commissioned for outdoor display, these new bronzes are less environmental than they are object-like, intimate, in their scale anf form, showcasing the artist re-engaging with the mode as a new series of entry and exit points.
The show closes December 22nd.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Wyatt Kahn at Eva Presenhuber [Exhibition Site]
