Harper’s is pleased to present concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Scott Kahn and Madeleine Bialke. In paintings that are at turns subtle and sublime, Kahn and Bialke revisit a myriad of possibilities offered by the landscape genre by infusing quotidian scenes with an otherworldly sensibility. The exhibitions will open on Saturday, June 15 with a reception, attended by the artists, from 6 to 8 pm.
Featuring fourteen works produced over the last three decades, Diary, Continued will be installed in the first-floor gallery and will highlight the artist’s striking, intricately detailed approach to naturalistic painting. Depicting a sequence of serene moments—shadowy summer lawns, deserted domestic interiors, carefully cultivated gardens—Kahn’s canvases refract familiar scenes through the prism of memory, experience, and emotion. Whereas select landscapes, with their billowing clouds, austere symmetry, and horizontally arrayed bands, resemble hazy snapshots extracted from a dream, others more candidly incorporate the surreal: in Sunset from the Attic II, a dense web of foliage doubles as a building facade, while in Interior, the vivid visions of a sleeper, his limbs outstretched, engulf the walls surrounding him. Wielding an iconography and an aesthetic approach reminiscent of American Regionalism, Kahn merges the interior with the exterior, instilling his settings with a psychological force that is variously understated and overt.
Scott Kahn (b. 1946, Springfield, MA) received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, and an MFA from Rutgers University in 1970. Over the course of a five-decade-long career, Kahn’s work has been exhibited at Harper's, East Hampton; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York; Alexey von Schlippe Gallery, University of Connecticut, Groton, CT; Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Holyoke Museum, Holyoke, MA; Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY; and the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; among other venues. Kahn’s work is included in numerous public collections including Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; United Airlines, Dulles International Airport, Washington, DC; and Décor Heytens Belgique, Wavre, BE. He was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants in 1986 and 1995, and participated in residencies at the Albee Foundation, Montauk, NY; and the Mosaic Colony, Southampton, NY. Kahn is currently based in New Rochelle, New York.