Scott Kahn: Silent Night at David Zwirner

Scott Kahn: Silent Night is on view at David Zwirner's 537 West 20th Street space in Chelsea through October 17, so the run is nearly over. Landscape is the central genre of Kahn's practice, and the show pairs new and recent paintings with works from the past twenty-five years, letting visitors follow the motifs he has returned to again and again.

Kahn was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1946. He earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and studied at the Art Students League in New York the next year under Theodoros Stamos, where he also met artists such as Mark Rothko. He soon turned away from abstraction toward figuration and completed an MFA at Rutgers in 1970. He has worked representationally for more than five decades and lives in Westchester, New York. In 2024 David Zwirner Hong Kong presented Once in a Blue Moon, his first solo show in Asia.

His landscapes draw on places he has lived and visited, a kind of visual diary, yet they are not literal records. Trees, clouds and grass are rendered in his own pictographic shorthand, and ordinary scenes are shot through with electric color or ghostly shadow. Kahn describes landscape as a vehicle for expressing mood.

Windows and moons run through the exhibition. The Basement (2025) shows barren red, blue and green trees ringing a window onto an endless green wood, based on a recurring dream of his childhood home. In The Leaves Have Fallen (2024/2025), a central tree splits the canvas into a sunny autumn day and a dark winter night. Leap from the Balcony looks through a wooden frame at a golden sunset over sea and sky. Blue Moon (2021) sets an oversized moon in a calm daytime sky with thin red cirrus clouds, while Silent Night, Moon (2026), based on his own backyard, divides the scene with a hedge beneath a heavy full moon.

His newest paintings play with perspective to unsettle the viewer. Melt Off (2026) has a curving horizon and light that slides from day into dusk. Also on view are Silent Night (2026) and The Studio, Homage to Hans Hofmann (2026). The works are oil on linen, canvas or wood panel.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.