Scott Kahn Reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

Scott Kahn’s Silent Night at David Zwirner, which includes more than twenty paintings the artist executed between 2003 and 2026 (with the majority made over the last few years), is something of a retrospective, albeit one focused on his landscape genre painting in particular. The works are all very well done, and a few are truly outstanding. The most exceptional include Leap from the Balcony (2003), The Basement Window (2025), and Melt Off (2026), which purpose an internal framing device, and paintings like April in Old Lyme (2008) and Blue Moon (2020), in which Kahn evinces a fastidious command of palette and perspective, the luster of the former licensing the sway of the latter. It should be noted and appreciated that Kahn’s works are rather beautiful. Within the semblance of contemporary painting, to pursue rather than sideline or outright reject beauty is deserving of approbation, as it requires a degree of courage to break from the prevailing orthodoxy that has reigned since modernism’s ascendency. More importantly, however, in so doing, Kahn’s work fruitfully galvanizes a set of theoretical questions that are all too often dismissed. Indeed, his landscapes demonstrate that there is still much to be plumbed in beautiful landscape painting and that this can be achieved without trafficking in bog-standard photorealism or retrograde academicism.

Read more at The Brooklyn Rail.