Scott Kahn: Silent Night

Based on a recurring dream of the artist’s childhood home, the composition in The Basement Window (2025) seems to merge interior and exterior space. The house that Kahn grew up in had its main entrance on the second floor, and Kahn’s bedroom on the subterranean level, with a large window that looked out onto the woods behind. Here, this basic structure is recreated to hyperrealistic effect.

Based on the backyard of Kahn’s home, Silent Night, Moon (2026) features a curving path that trails off into unknown terrain. Manicured bushes section the canvas roughly in half, creating two interlocking but independent compositions that each inform the other, with a small opening in the hedges connecting the two. Lingering patches of snow that populate the foreground are mirrored by swaths of light that glow eerily in the distance. The full moon, which appears throughout Kahn’s body of work as a sort of omen for the scene laid out beneath, hangs heavily above.

Windows appear frequently in Kahn’s body of work, often hovering in space or placed incongruously within a landscape as a harbinger of both the uncertainty and the opportunity of a new chapter. Leap from the Balcony (2003) features a golden sunset glimpsed through a wood frame that separates the space of the viewer from an expanse of sea and sky.

Blue Moon (2020) presents a placid daytime vista in which thin red cirrus clouds gently surround the outsized sphere. Here, Kahn cannily plays with the chromatic implications of this phrase, presenting a moonscape that pulls the viewer into another realm.

In The Basement (2025), waving red, blue, and green trees, their branches barren, encircle a centrally placed window that looks out onto an endless verdant wood. Based on a recurring dream of the artist’s childhood home, the work seems to merge interior and exterior space.

As its title suggests, The Leaves Have Fallen (2024/2025) pictures a seasonal shift—the vivid colors of fall ceding to the more subdued tones of winter. The painting lacks a horizon line, and a centrally placed tree bifurcates the canvas, creating two distinct compositions—at left, a sunny fall day and at right, a dusky winter night—that mirror each other. In the background, a window frame hovers in space; this motif appears frequently throughout Kahn’s body of work as a harbinger of both the uncertainty and the opportunity of a new chapter.

In Kahn’s newest paintings, he plays with perspective in a way that subtly destabilizes the viewer’s experience. Melt Off (2026) features a curving horizon that reinforces the windswept feeling of blowing trees and trailing clouds as the winter snow recedes. Bright daylight slips into dusk across the surface of the work, and a path seemingly to nowhere trails off into the twilit terrain.