Wolf Kahn

Thomas Segal Gallery, Baltimore

Acquired from the above in 1995 by the present owner

Orange with Trees Before It emphasizes Wolf Khan’s interest in the interaction between representational and abstract painting, capturing his love for vibrant color palettes and anticipating a turn towards heavier abstraction in his later work. Khan transforms the swaths of pigment into a tangible landscape, while still evoking color field abstractions. The colors in the present work strike a visual chord of harmonizing purples, oranges and greens. The grove of trees in the foreground emphasizes the frontality of the painting, arranged along one even groundline and composed of energetic white markings that suggest intertwining branches. In the last two decades of the artist’s life, screens of tangled trees such as this became a recurring motif in Kahn’s work, and the unrestrained quality of his brushstrokes demonstrates the influence of abstract expressionism on his style. 

Often painting en plein-air, he found great inspiration in the landscapes around him. The natural world was a jumping off point from which he extracted his brilliant color palettes and engaging compositions. Though Kahn fluctuated between abstraction and realism throughout his career, he remained steadfast in saturating his canvases with mesmerizing pigments. Through his color combinations and expressive brushstrokes, Khan finds breathtaking beauty in the simplest of subjects and transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.