THOMAS DEANS FINE ART
Cecily Kahn is coming to Atlanta this Friday, Sept 16th, for the opening of her first exhibition in the city. I first saw Cecily's energizing abstract work a year ago in New York at her critically acclaimed show at Lohin-Geduld Gallery in Chelsea. I knew from that first encounter with her bold forms and intense color that I had to show the work here. What struck me immediately, as it must every viewer, is her fearless use of color--like a clarion challenge to viewers lulled by today's fashionable neutrals. Fearless, shocking, visceral, playful, joyous --the adjectives are as endless as viewers' responses. Take a look on our website, www.thomasdeans.com
Art Without Image
Kahn's work is more than the sum of its colors. Underneath, a keen intellect is at work paying homage to and seeking dialog with the history of abstract painting in the twentieth century. Formal abstraction is art at its purest--it isn't a "picture" of anything, rather it is a synthesis of color, form, visual rhythm, and texture. The combination of these elements provokes an emotional, sometimes visceral, response.
A century ago, both art and music were saturated with imagery that imposed meaning on the viewer. Abstraction was a twentieth-century response to this, taking art back to the basics of line, form, and color. The great composer Igor Stravinsky summed up the concept when he said that music expresses nothing but itself. It was, he believed, up to audiences and viewers to find meaning in their own personal response.
In Kahn's work, the viewer can see 1920s-30s formal constructivist design side by side with elements of later abstract movements, such as 1940s-50s "action painting," and 1960-70s "process painting". Her paint surfaces reflect this- paint thickly and thinly applied or poured to achieve a rich variety of plastic forms. With color and form emerging through both instinctive processes and consciously formal decisions, Kahn creates a visual world uniquely her own.
Kahn's connection to abstraction is more than intellectual. Her mother, Emily Mason, is a distinguished and widely exhibited abstract painter, as was her grandmother, Alice Trumbull Mason. (Kahn, her mother, and grandmother share the spotlight this November at New York's Hunter College in an exhibition celebrating three generations the artist's family.) Her father, Wolf Kahn, is an influential painter whose semi-abstract landscapes have been widely admired for decades. An extraordinary color sense links these generations of artists.
Cecily Kahn's exhibition at Thomas Deans Fine Art continues, Tues-Sat, 11-5, through October 8.
