Misha Kahn: All Intensive Purposes at Friedman Benda

Friedman Benda in Chelsea presents Misha Kahn's All Intensive Purposes from October 29 to December 12, 2026, marking ten years of collaboration between the artist and the gallery.

The title bends the familiar phrase "all intents and purposes," moving the emphasis from a fixed destination to the intensity of the journey. Kahn works in a way that is deliberate yet unpredictable, layering material experiments and borrowed techniques, and feeding incidental outcomes back into each piece.

A centerpiece is the sprawling cast-metal dining table Post Apertivi Detritus. It begins with a sculpted torn napkin, gristly scrap of food included, speared with toothpicks, while the tabletop in cast glass and stone sets up a staccato graphic rhythm. A low table carved entirely from onyx makes the stone pose as something far cruder. A new group of upholstered works layers bold marks over jarring arrangements of shapes, so the pieces look sculpted from paint. Works in Alpi plywood turn colorful laminated material back into tree forms, only to carve them up again into objects.

The range of craft is wide: chandeliers knitted from copper, and wispy drapery carved in Calacatta marble. The tension between spontaneity and technical rigor lets even the oddest idea be followed to its limit. With so many materials and processes in one room, the show comes to resemble the absurd collage of the world outside.

Kahn was born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1989 and earned a BFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. He drew early attention in the Museum of Arts and Design Biennial in 2014. His methods run from improvised molds and collage to virtual reality, across metal, glass, wood, textiles, ceramic, fiberglass, resin and cement. His Scrappy series, begun in 2015, is woven with Gone Rural, a group of traditional weavers in Eswatini, and he has also worked with Stephens Tapestry Studio in South Africa, Alma Allen's studio in Mexico, and glass sculptor Deborah Czeresko in Brooklyn.

His first institutional solo show, Wobble Moon, was held at Museum Villa Stuck in 2022. His work belongs to the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Corning Museum of Glass, Dallas Museum of Art, LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the RISD Museum and the Speed Art Museum. He lives and works between Brooklyn and Hudson, New York.