Friedman Benda is pleased to announce Misha Kahn’s All Intensive Purposes, celebrating a decade of collaboration with the gallery, opening on October 29 and running through December 12.
With All Intensive Purposes, Kahn has produced a body of work that follows a tangent. All Intensive Purposes upends the familiar phrase “all intents and purposes,” shifting focus from a predetermined end to the intensity of getting there. It reflects a creative process that is intentional but unknowable. Precise choices are made in a vacuum, where structure and form answer only to Kahn’s own logic. He builds his objects through layers of material experimentation and cross-pollination, with incidental and unlikely outcomes continually added back in.
Throughout the exhibition, solid structures attempt to contain rambling ideas — toggling between the past, present and imagined. A discarded scrap of paper can be folded, twisted and torqued into a new form or its journey to the gallery can be traced back to its origin from tree to pulp. A sprawling cast metal dining table (Post Apertivi Detritus) begins with a sense of order: a sculpted torn napkin complete with a gristly bit of food, is impaled with toothpicks; its graphic tabletop — rendered in cast glass and stone — creates the visual effect of a staccato rhythm. A low table carved entirely from onyx forces the stone to impersonate a much cruder construction. In a new series of upholstered works, a jarring composition of shapes is amplified by bold marks, suggesting further visual depth while rendering the whole as if it had been sculpted from paint. There are works created with Alpi plywood – colorful multilaminar components returning to tree-forms, only to be butchered back into objects.
The spontaneity in All Intensive Purposes creates a pleasant friction with the technical skill evident in the objects and the broad swath of craft they encompass. Whether Kahn is knitting chandeliers out of copper or carving wispy drapery into Calacatta marble, the rigor of making gives even the most unlikely idea permission to be followed to the fullest extent of its own peculiar laws. With its gluttonous array of materials and processes, All Intensive Purposes begins to resemble the world it denies coming from: the absurd collage outside.
ABOUT MISHA KAHN
Misha Kahn has emerged as one of the leading creative voices of his generation. Through a wildly imaginative approach that embraces spontaneity and non-conformity, Kahn allows the illogical and the irreverent to take over his process. He employs an entire spectrum from lo-fi and ad hoc techniques— such as improvisational molds and collage—to virtual reality.
Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1989, Kahn graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Furniture Design. Early in his career, he gained recognition when he was featured in the Museum of Arts and Design’s Biennial (2014).
Unafraid to push boundaries, Kahn is driven to self-invent, adapt, and further processes in a myriad of mediums including metalwork, glass, wood, textiles, ceramic, casting, fiberglass, resin, and cement. Embracing an unorthodox result, he seeks the opportunity to learn from masters in their respective crafts. For example, Kahn’s acclaimed woven Scrappy series (since 2015) is the result of a collaboration with Gone Rural, a female group of traditional weavers based in Eswatini. He has also produced several woven tapestries and rugs with Stephens Tapestry Studio of South Africa. Other meaningful practitioners whom Kahn has worked with include artist Alma Allen’s studio in Mexico, glass sculptor Deborah Czeresko in Brooklyn, and the famed late Italian jewelry designer GianCarlo Montebello.
In April 2022 Museum Villa Stuck hosted Kahn’s first institutional solo show titled Wobble Moon: Objects from the Capricious Age. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Corning Museum of Glass, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Rhode island School of Design Museum, RI, and Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY. Kahn lives and works between Brooklyn and Hudson, NY.
