At David Zwirner New York, Scott Kahn’s Landscapes Open Windows Onto Other Worlds
Observer ·
An Instagram endorsement from Matthew Wong set off a market ascent that took the painter's prices from $5,000 to more than $1 million. His latest show gathers moonlit landscapes and luminous interiors from the past quarter-century.
There is something deeply mystical, almost archetypal, about Scott Kahn’s paintings, which accounts for much of their charm. Their universal resonance with very different viewers lies in how they function as both visual metaphors and symbolic enactments of the eternal human quest to understand our place before the immensity of nature and the cosmos. In his landscapes, the human figure, when it appears at all, is reduced to a minimal presence, a witness immersed in the vastness of expansive natural scenes, often caught in transition, as if to symbolize the cyclical nature of existence within the essential continuum of transformation between sunrise and dusk, birth and death.
This universally resonant symbolism helps explain the artist’s sudden market rise in his 70s, after years spent largely unrecognized. At a 2018 solo exhibition at Ober Gallery in Connecticut, Kahn’s paintings were priced between $5,000 and $12,000. Then his longtime friend Matthew Wong shared his work on Instagram, a strong endorsement that introduced Kahn to a new network of international collectors, including buyers in Asia, where Wong’s own market was particularly active. Kahn began showing with galleries including Nicelle Beauchene , Harper’s and Almine Rech , which brought him an even more international audience. By November 2021, he had set a new auction record approaching the million-dollar mark when Cadman Plaza (2002) sold for HK$7.51 million (about $963,000) at Phillips in Hong Kong. His auction record now stands at $1.43 million, set by Big House, Homage to America (2012) at Christie’s Hong Kong. Since David Zwirner announced its exclusive global representation, his works have been priced between $290,000 and $1 million on the primary market.
Following “Once in a Blue Moon,” at Zwirner’s Hong Kong space in November 2024, Kahn’s New York show, “Silent Night,” draws on paintings made from 2000 to the present, offering an insightful overview of his approach to painting and its alchemical capacity for world-building. As we walk through the show, Kahn describes his work as a kind of visual diary, a collection of inner visions that emerge from an emotionally and psychologically heightened processing of his surroundings: “They come from a kind of internal dialogue with myself. I’m inspired by life, and I find life very mysterious.”
Kahn has always been drawn to symbolism, dreams and the unconscious. Though inspired by the reality around him, his paintings do not simply reproduce what he sees: they are heightened subconscious visions that surface on a sensory level and find their form on the canvas. Once the impulse arrives, he begins with paint, making a small pencil study only when architecture demands greater precision. Even in a large painting, he can often establish the essential composition in the first session. “I like giving birth as an analogy, because all the DNA is there right from the start,” he says. “But I like the process of refining it, making it something beautiful.”
Kahn describes his process as a direct conversation with the painting. After a day’s work, often after dinner, he looks at the canvas again to see what it needs next, setting up the following day’s work. Each new development prompts another response, sometimes revealing a detail he had not anticipated, and those small surprises keep the process alive. “When I paint something like a landscape, I have to wait for something in the landscape—how I observe it, how I experience it, how I feel about it—to happen to me,” he notes.
The Basement Window (2025), based on a recurring dream about the artist’s childhood home, is a case in point: the composition dynamically merges interior and exterior while expanding the image’s sensory dimension to encompass the vivid emotions that accompany and shape that memory.
Kahn has also painted portraits, but nature is the subject that recurs throughout his work. When we spoke, he candidly acknowledged his strengths and weaknesses as a painter, conceding that rendering the human figure within a narrative composition is not his strongest suit. He never attended art school, but despite his lack of formal training in representational painting, he is deeply knowledgeable about art history.
That knowledge surfaces in his paintings, which often play with tropes and compositions drawn from iconic works by earlier artists. Many of his windows, paths and ambiguous interior-exterior spaces function as portals to other worlds. In Leap from the Balcony (2003), for instance, a golden sunset opens through a wooden frame that separates the viewer from an expanse of sea and sky.
Kahn associates the window with a source of light in darkness or a passage to another dimension. His windows often begin as real ones he has encountered, including those in his studio, before taking on another function in a painting: “Light reveals the world to us… Whatever it is that I’m painting, it’s just a vehicle to express light which to me is a very spiritual thing.”
His spiritual life, Kahn explains, is found in his work, though he does not adhere to any established religion. His fascination with the cosmos, especially the sun and moon, belongs to a more primordial sense of wonder, to the eternal quest for meaning in our existence. “I think human beings have looked toward the sky and found it so mysterious,” he says, noting how this led us to invent calendars, symbols, gods and goddesses in response to the movement of the moon and other celestial bodies.
Light is fundamental to his practice as the very condition through which the world becomes visible: his painting is all about the phenomenology of being in the world as it appears to us. Kahn pointed to a moon composition he had painted in several versions, years apart. Two of them hang in the same room, Lunar Eclipse II (2008/2009) and Wolf Moon (2023). Both capture the magical, mysterious moment of a lunar eclipse, a phenomenon that alters the very conditions of vision while prompting deeper reflection on our place in the cosmos.
Although this body of work insistently depicts night skies, and he has become increasingly nocturnal himself, Kahn could not fully explain his preference for the night imagery that came to dominate the show. In that darkness, purplish reds and bluish greens emerge as two recurring characters in his palette.
In the last room, paintings such as The Leaves Have Fallen (2024/2025) depict a seasonal shift, the vivid colors of fall giving way to the subdued tones of winter. Kahn chooses to portray a scene in which these seasons, moments and atmospheres coexist, as if embracing the continuous flux that makes life possible and sets the rhythm and tempo of our transient existence.
Looking back on his beginnings in geometric abstraction, Kahn admits that he chose that language largely because of the artistic milieu around him. Abstraction eventually felt like a dead end after he settled in the Bowery.
For Kahn, making art is a necessity rather than a matter of producing objects, an essential way to understand himself and his relationship to the world: “They ultimately serve to understand myself and my relationship to life and the world, and hopefully to understand some of the profound questions: Why are we here? What are we doing here? Do I have a reason to be here?”
Above all, Kahn hopes viewers will experience a similarly intense emotional response to his images. He compares encountering a painting to listening to music: most people don’t listen in order to analyze its key or structure but because it moves them. “I hope somehow I convey my experience of life to the viewer on some level, even if it’s superficial, even if they feel it’s just something beautiful to look at,” he reflects. “I hope some of the concerns I have in doing the work are conveyed to the audience. I hope the connecting thread through all my work is an underpinning of poetry and depth. I think that’s what people are responding to.”