Philip Smith/Wolf Kahn

December 4, 2008 - January 5, 2009 Boca Raton Gallery

Artist and writer Philip Smith paints modernist figurative works in a mixed-media format. Smith is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He is also the best-selling author of Walking Through Walls, a memoir of life with his faith healer, psychic father in Miami during the '50s and '60s. 

Smith’s paintings can be viewed as symbolic personal pictographs that encourage the viewer to try and decipher their message, much as if they were written in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing. The dense detail of his imagery draws the viewer to contemplate the deceptively specific iconography that suggests ancient cultures of the Near East and Mesoamerica. The paintings include references to astronomical and astrological signs like spirals, knots and other interwoven patterns amidst self-portraits and other figurative imagery.

 

There is a duality to Smith’s paintings. One is tempted on an immediate level to categorize them from the perceived specific iconography. However, upon closer inspection, their content remains elusive, presenting a personal imagery that resists full disclosure. This ambiguity tends to distance the viewer while at the same time holding him transfixed by the sheer visual abundance of these enchanting canvases.

Wolf Kahn is the foremost landscape painter working in America today. Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, Kahn immigrated to England in 1939 and subsequently moved to the United States in 1940. He graduated in 1945 from the New York High School of Music and Art. After a stint in the U.S. Navy Kahn had an opportunity through the GI bill to study with the well-known Color Field painter, Hans Hofmann. The fact that German was his first language enabled him to translate Hofmann’s characteristic mix of German and English for his fellow students. His study with Hofmann in the areas of abstract expressionism and Color Field discipline would later prove invaluable in the formation of Kahn’s signature synthesis style of painting. This blend of traditional landscape realism coupled with sweeping bands of color and painterly abstraction embodies a luminous, atmospheric style that is uniquely his own.

Kahn is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.

Kahn’s career as a painter has spanned a period of over 50 years, with his first solo exhibition held in the mid-1950s in Manhattan. He recently returned to his native Germany for the first time since World War II for an exhibition of his paintings and pastels in Hamburg.