Seven Paintings: Tobi Kahn At The Phillips Collection

In 1985, The Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted an exhibition of contemporary young artists, called “New Horizons in American Art” that included the work of Tobi Kahn. Kahn’s featured paintings were abstractions of landscapes, the images anchored in black artist-made frames, the palette dark, the paint applied thickly and worked strenuously, the effect serious and, at times, somber. In many ways, that exhibition established Kahn as an artist worth watching and following.

Now, a whole career later, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., which is celebrating its 100^th year, has installed a retrospective of the Kahn works in their collection – seven works in one room spanning Kahn’s career from 1977 to the present. This is a wonderful retrospective of a living artist who is still very much mid-career and whose work continues to evolve and to reach for deeper truths, in works of increasing emotional strength and beauty.

In the earliest work displayed, from Kahn’s 1977 White Windows Series, a white rectangle is dissected horizontally and vertically into thirds, making for nine equal squares. At first glance, the works seems a marriage of Kasimir’s Malevich’s white on white Suprematist work and Agnes Martin’s white grids. However, on closer inspection, what we see is a window looking out from the artist’s studio, in which some of the detritus from Kahn’s studio has been incorporated into the painting’s surface.

This is all the more striking because, at this same moment, the Phillips has also organized a concurrent exhibition of Picasso’s Blue period, which includes several paintings Picasso made looking out from the windows of his first studios lending Kahn’s painting an additional resonance.

Similarly, outside the room exhibiting the Kahn paintings is a painting by one of Kahn’s favorite artists Arthur Dove – while in the next room is a beautiful work by Richard Diebenkorn. To experience these works, and walk between them is to experience a conversation about painting across generations and time.

The next painting in the exhibition chronologically, GRYA, from 1986, like the work in the Guggenheim show, abstracts a landscape in ways simultaneously foreboding and yet calming. What looks like a river is a zig-zag with angles too sharp for nature but that lead the eye right off the painting, an effect that is controlled and at the same time expansive, while the brushwork, intense and intensive, speaks to the energies, frustrations, and ambitions of the young artist.

In my own imagination, I have always seen Kahn’s early paintings, dark with thickly worked paint, as reflecting a young artist’s inner dialogue; while the later paintings, lighter and more graceful, more meditative than obsessive, speak to me consciously or unconsciously of the satisfactions of adult personal life (marriage, children, career).

Accordingly, by the time of 1989’s SIDO, Kahn had pushed his abstracted landscapes to a place more concerned with the tensions between forms and colors. SIDO teases an optical illusion: Are we looking at a red river and a grey sea passing between two boulders and around two rocks? Or are we looking at an anthropomorphic form – a space alien? Or is this Kahn’s frum interpretation of Gustave Courbet’s “The Origin of the World”? The last is unlikely (apologies for my errant imagination) – but Kahn leaves the interpretation to the viewer. There is something mysterious and mystical to this piece that speaks to Kahn’s search to reflect the spiritual in art.

We see this as well in LYJE, from 1991, which abstracts a flower. Here the flower stands tall, like an icon, its red petal commanding our attention. In contrast to the sexualized botany of Georgia O’Keefe (to whom Kahn’s work has been compared), this flower stands as a declaration of the holy in the everyday.

For me, the most powerful painting in the exhibition is RIGU from 1999. Six feet wide and only two feet tall, RIGU is a canvas suffused with grey in which three tendrils emerge from the left side of the canvas, while just left of center is one triangular shape. One can easily see this as coastline and inlets and off the coast, a rock (or island), all on a grey day when there is little to distinguish sea from sky. Although, Kahn has hinted at forms beneath the surface existing like rocks under water, what gives this painting its tremendous power is the dynamic tension between the two dark masses and the seeming blank space surrounding it. I could not take my eyes off it.

Two more recent paintings are also noteworthy. AYLA is a meditation that seems to be expressive of the calm that comes with mastery of one’s talent and contentment with one’s place in the world. Although AYLA could be compared to a Rothko with its color blocks, the effect is very different. Rothko takes us into the dark recesses of the soul, while Kahn has his eye on the further horizon, a place of limitless possibility.

Finally, INHA, Kahn’s most recent work from 2020 represents a departure, or perhaps a renewal, as we see a hand reaching around what seems like the human form that is both curved and elongated in a manner that recalls, coincidentally, the figures in Picasso’s Blue paintings. Again, this resonance between the two shows at the Phillips makes walking back and forth between the two all the more richly rewarding.

There’s a game in which people are challenged to tell a story in just five words. Here in just seven paintings, we see the breadth and evolution of Kahn’s work. What has remained constant is Kahn’s application of paint to create tension between forms and color and to create mood in ways organic, spiritual, and existential, all in a pursuit of transcendence.