Born in Stuttgart in 1927, Wolf Kahn fled Germany at age 12 and moved to the United States in 1940. After attending the High School of Music and Art in New York City, he continued his studies at the Hans Hofmann School, becoming Hofmann’s studio assistant. His native tongue was often an advantage in Hofmann’s classroom, as he frequently translated the teachers’ signature mix of German and English for his fellow students. After over two years of training under Hofmann, Kahn later relocated to Chicago where he received a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Chicago.

Influenced by Hofmann’s practice of using nature as the starting point for a painting, Kahn’s work encompasses both pictorial landscape and painterly abstraction. Converging color and light to create atmospheric and sensual pictorial fields, his paintings evoke the ethereal world of nature even when they are non-representational. (continued)