This is “The Overlook,” a column by Sarah Cascone about the lives and work of artists who have been passed over, excluded from, or otherwise left out of the mainstream art world.
Scott Kahn never imagined that he would be kicking off New York’s busy fall art season with a solo show at the mega-gallery David Zwirner. Ten years ago, he was a 70-year-old artist living in his cousin’s attic. He had come to accept that his painstakingly rendered, boldly colored landscapes would never be noticed by the art establishment.
“I really felt like… I would die in poverty,” Kahn tells CULTURED. “It was always, always, always a financial struggle. A struggle for recognition.”
In recent years, however, the artist experienced a profound change of fortune. His Zwirner show, “Silent Night,” on view through Oct. 17 in New York, is his second with the gallery (after a 2024 exhibition in Hong Kong). Paintings are priced between $350,000 and $1 million, with editioned prints also available at $5,000 to $12,000.
Three factors led to this rapid, late-career rise: the pandemic-era market boom, support from the late art star Matthew Wong, and Kahn’s own unwillingness to give up.
Before he was a nascent art-market darling, Kahn was a little boy who loved art class in Springfield, Massachusetts. After attending the University of Pennsylvania as a pre-dental student in 1967, he saw two paths before him: one as an artist, the other as a dentist. He chose art, he says, when he realized, “I don’t want to look down people’s mouths for the rest of my life!”
Kahn studied under Abstract Expressionist Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League of New York before earning an MFA in 1970 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Through the League, Kahn got a glimpse into the New York School, bartending at parties for the likes of Mark Rothko and Lee Krasner. “I was meeting the crème de la crème of the art world, kind of as an observer—but it was fascinating,” he says.
At the time, Kahn was painting abstract grids. But he felt like something was missing. “It wasn’t reflecting my life,” he recalls. By the late 1980s, Kahn had shifted direction, embracing figuration to paint saturated landscapes—he is now known for his sinuous trees and his fascination with the moon, typically rendered as a shimmering orb lighting up the night. He began showing with Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York and used a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant to stop working nights as a typist for a law firm.
“I encourage young artists to quit their day jobs,” Kahn tells me. “It forces you to say, ‘How meaningful is your work? And are you really gonna dedicate yourself to this kind of a life, no matter how difficult it is?’”
For Kahn, it was extremely difficult. After his last show with Perlow in 2004, opportunities dried up. Inheritance from the deaths of his mother and brother helped him make ends meet, as did the money from a buyout when his rent-controlled West Village apartment went condo. But by 2017, he was living in the attic of his cousin’s New Rochelle home, and commuting down to his studio in Dumbo. “I couldn’t afford to move,” Kahn says. “I would have been in the street, literally.”
The turning point came after Kahn struck up a friendship via Facebook with the late Matthew Wong, a young artist whose star was on the rise. Wong, who died by suicide in 2019 at the age of 35, took up the brush in 2011 and soon became a prolific painter. Despite living far from the New York art world, first in Hong Kong and later in Edmonton, Canada, Wong cultivated online friendships with many artists. He and Kahn became especially close, and would meet whenever Wong visited New York as he began showing with Karma gallery.
“There was an immediate kind of connection between us. I understood him, and he understood me,” Kahn says.
Wong also knew that Kahn was struggling. In 2018, he bought one of Kahn’s paintings, and posted a photo of it on Instagram, citing the older artist as one of his influences. Both artists shared a penchant for rich, moody colors, and for creating contemplative, sometimes melancholic scenes imbued with a certain Zen-like quality. The response was immediate. Suddenly, the art world was knocking on Kahn’s door.
Kahn began getting shows again, with two in New York at Almine Rech in 2021 and 2022. His auction market also took off. Kahn’s current record of HK$11.25 million ($1.4 million) was set at Christie’s Hong Kong in May 2022 with the 2012 painting Big House, Homage to America. It depicts a charming white home against a bright blue sky, with towering trees casting long shadows across a well-tended green lawn.
Prior to 2021, only six works by Kahn had ever come up for auction. The only one that sold, according to the Artnet Price Database, fetched just $500 in 2017. His next painting on the block, Cadman Plaza, 2002, sold for $963,000—more than 1,500 times as much in 2021.
From there, the floodgates opened. Auction houses offered 127 works in the last five years, bringing in a total of nearly $23 million with an 80 percent sell-through rate. The average price, for the 101 that sold, was $227,618.
At a moment when new money was flooding into the art market and buyers were clamoring for new work by fresh stars, Kahn was suddenly in the right place at the right time. And while many artists who shot into the market’s stratosphere during the pandemic saw demand for their work tumble over the past three years, Kahn hasn’t lost momentum. According to an email from a representative for Zwirner, the gallery has been “prioritizing major collections, including institutions,” when placing his work.
Kahn’s career ascension has undeniably changed his life for the better. Three years ago, he was finally able to move out of the attic and rent a home of his own, just down the street. But he wouldn’t necessarily change his journey. “When you don’t have recognition, you don’t have any money, and there’s nobody breathing down your back for your work,” Kahn says, “it gives you a great deal of freedom.”
With the support of a major gallery, “everything’s kind of flipped. Now I have the financial security, but I feel… not that I’m lacking freedom in my work, but I feel the pressure of the world,” he adds. “There’s no preparation for this. There’s no school for it. I’m just kind of winging it.”
There have been a few hiccups, including a lawsuit, which Kahn declined to comment on, after he signed with Zwirner in April 2024. Curator and dealer Eric Ian Hornak Spoutz accused the artist of a breach of contract after he canceled an auction he had helped arrange at Phillips Hong Kong. (A judge dismissed the suit with prejudice in March 2025.)
But the main pressure Kahn says he’s facing is the knowledge that his time is growing limited. The works in the new Zwirner show date from the year 2000 onward, including a full suite of canvases from 2026 in the final room. Kahn hadn’t seen some of the older works, on loan from private collections for the occasion, in decades. (Not all of them are for sale.)
As Kahn gave me a tour of the exhibition, it became clear that these weren’t just beautiful landscapes, painted over months with carefully applied layers of glazes. Each piece harks back to specific times in his life—a “visual diary,” as he puts it.
From his childhood memories, Kahn has painted the view from his basement window, looking out over a small wooded valley with a stream running through it. For years, Kahn has had a recurring dream of that room, which he called his sanctuary, featuring a beam of light coming through the windows and piercing the darkness. In the painting The Basement, 2025, the trees are both inside and outside, their roots growing into the floor and branches stretching out toward the ceiling.
Other paintings have an almost tropical feel, thick with lush greenery and punctured by fiery sunsets. Kahn painted these in Sarasota, Florida, while caring for his mother at the end of her life. “I think my mother would be terribly upset if she knew the money that she left me, that I used it to continue painting,” Kahn admits, adding that she had always tried to convince him to do something more lucrative. “I wish she could be alive today to see that it wasn’t a waste of money.”
Kahn has painted portraits over the years—when he first abandoned abstraction for figuration, it was with a self-portrait—but there are almost no people depicted in the current show. The notable exception is The Two of Us, 2026, in which two beings, seemingly made of light, walk arm-in-arm along a wilderness path beneath an orange moon hanging in a deep navy sky. It is a tribute to Kahn’s husband, the poet and playwright Frederick Kirwin, who he met through Edward Albee, the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (The couple recently established the Kahn-Kirwin Foundation to support emerging artists and writers.)
“At the moment of conception, when the sperm hits the egg, somehow, they have detected a flash of light, energy, at the moment of inception,” Kahn says. “The whole idea of the creation of life, life coming from energy and light—I wanted to express that is how I feel about my 51-year relationship with my partner. I portrayed us connected, as if we were one, by light.”
This sense of beauty and awe, wonder and hope, permeates all of his canvases—a reminder that Kahn believed in his vision for years when no one else did.
“Scott Kahn: Silent Night” is on view at David Zwirner, New York, through Oct. 17.
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