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Lot Essay
‘“Not Available”, Wyatt Kahn’s large, intensely black yet lustrous canvases immediately evoke [Agnes] Martin’s tension between ideals of perfection and the deliberate imperfections of her hand-drawn, irregular grids. Kahn preps linen canvas with high pigmented gesso, then layers inks, watercolours and acrylics with dry and wet brush to produce abstract grounds, over which he makes silverpoint drawings based on a slightly inexact one-point perspective. Referencing both the grid and the idea of the sublime – two foundations of American modernism – he creates imagined landscapes broken down into abstract forms, held between expressive disorder and the orderly silverpoint marks floating on the surface, sometimes clear, sometimes disappearing. The effect is a tour de force of light penetrating darkness, as if shafts of sun now and then pierce storm-clouds. Blake and Constable come to mind, as well as Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, Rothko, Malevich’ (J. Wullschlager, ‘Driven to abstraction’ in The Financial Times, 30 April 2010).