Night Windows on 20th Street, Scott Kahn's Moons at David Zwirner
A self-taught painter who found his market in his seventies fills a Chelsea gallery with eclipses, dark woods and windows that open onto dreams
Two moons hang in the same room. Both catch a lunar eclipse, the moment when the light itself goes strange. One, Lunar Eclipse II, is dated 2008 and 2009. The other, Wolf Moon, came in 2023. Scott Kahn likes to come back to a sky.
His show at David Zwirner is called Silent Night, and the title fits. It runs at the gallery's 537 West 20th Street space through October 17, according to the gallery's exhibition page, and it gathers new and recent landscapes alongside work from the previous 25 years. A great many of the paintings are set after dark.
A Painter Who Stays Up Late
Kahn could not fully explain why night took over the show, he told the Observer in an interview published this week. The Observer notes that he has become increasingly nocturnal himself. In the dark, two colors keep returning, a purplish red and a bluish green.
He works in conversation with the canvas. After a day in the studio, often after dinner, he looks at the painting again to decide what it needs next, and that sets up the following day's work. He starts with paint and makes a small pencil study only when architecture calls for precision. Even on a large canvas, he can often set the whole composition in the first session.
"I like giving birth as an analogy, because all the DNA is there right from the start," he told the Observer. "But I like the process of refining it, making it something beautiful."
Windows Into Other Rooms
Windows are everywhere in this work. Some come from real windows Kahn has known, including the ones in his studio. In the paintings they float, or turn up in places a window has no business being. The gallery reads them as signs of a new chapter, uncertain and full of possibility at once.
The Basement Window, from 2025, comes out of a recurring dream about his childhood home. The gallery explains that the house had its main entrance on the second floor and Kahn's bedroom on the lowest level, with a big window that looked out on the woods behind. In The Basement, a larger canvas from the same year drawn from the same dream, bare red, blue and green trees ring a window that opens onto a deep green wood. Inside and outside trade places.
Leap from the Balcony frames a golden sunset through a wooden opening that holds the viewer back from sea and sky. In The Leaves Have Fallen, a tree splits the canvas in two. On the left it is a sunny fall day. On the right it is a dusky winter night.
For Kahn, the subject is always light. "Whatever it is that I'm painting, it's just a vehicle to express light which to me is a very spiritual thing," he told the Observer. He does not follow any established religion, he said. The sun and the moon are enough. "I think human beings have looked toward the sky and found it so mysterious," he said.
"Whatever it is that I'm painting, it's just a vehicle to express light which to me is a very spiritual thing."
The Late Bloom
The other story in the room is the market. Kahn never went to art school. He started out in geometric abstraction and, after settling on the Bowery, found it had become a dead end. At a 2018 solo show at Ober Gallery in Connecticut, the Observer reports, his paintings sold for between $5,000 and $12,000.
Then his friend, the painter Matthew Wong, shared Kahn's work on Instagram and introduced him to a new circle of collectors, many of them in Asia. Galleries followed. By November 2021 his painting Cadman Plaza, from 2002, sold for HK$7.51 million, about $963,000, at Phillips in Hong Kong. His auction record now stands at $1.43 million, set at Christie's Hong Kong by Big House, Homage to America. Since Zwirner took him on, the Observer reports, new works have been priced between $290,000 and $1 million.
None of that is on the walls. What is on the walls is a painter who found his audience in his seventies, still looking up at the night.
Kahn hopes people simply feel something in front of them, the way most of us listen to music. "I hope somehow I convey my experience of life to the viewer on some level, even if it's superficial, even if they feel it's just something beautiful to look at," he told the Observer.
This fall has been loud with big names, from the Met, where Krasner and Pollock share the walls, on down. Kahn's rooms on 20th Street are quieter. Bring nothing but time. The moon will wait until October 17.
