spheris gallery | 59 South Main St | Hanover, NH | 603.640.6155

Daniel Kohn is a painter who is perhaps best known here in New York for the installation at Grand Central Station in 2002 memorializing the loss of the Trade Towers. The huge paintings were a celebration of the broad, sweeping urbanscapes as seen from the city’s highest vantage point. But his other wide-ranging installations—which span from this continent to Europe—examine architecture on the macro and micro scale, and how living spaces create spatial and emotional bonds.

Although figuration is always present in Kohn’s work, the backbone of his art is a sense of the architectonic nature of the painted space. Planes of light and color—of paint—define a radical space that challenges us as viewers through our bodies as well as our minds.

Kohn is an excellent draftsman. Elaborate compositions—a dinner table with glasses half filled with wine, people in conversation, empty bowls, shadows cast by the light from an adjacent kitchen—are carefully drawn in to begin the work. As the paintings progress and color fields are identified, objects and people are selectively painted out, leaving an open narrative and a dynamic sense of a space in flux. In all of the works, Kohn is handling oil paint more like watercolor, allowing it to glaze an area and wash layer by layer in the thinnest of patinas. Thus, the line between ‘painted areas’ and ‘drawn areas’ becomes moot: one’s eye moves easily from raw linen and charcoal to light filled areas of orange, or deep blue, as easily as passing from one room into another.

Prior to moving to New York, he did several projects in Europe, including an installation at the Church of Saint Andre in Montreuil, and several set designs for modern dance at the Theatre de Choisy le Roi. He is the recipient of a Threshold Grant from Hampshire College, a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the City of Montreuil, and the Ellen Batell Stoeckel Fellowship from Yale. Kohn is currently the first Artist in Residence at the Broad Institute, engaging in a research collaboration among MIT, Harvard, and the Whitehead Institute, bringing the power of genomics to medicine.