Misha Kahn: All Intensive Purposes

A decade-long collaboration between artist Misha Kahn and Friedman Benda, this exhibition celebrates spontaneous materiality and rigorous craft across sculpture, metalwork, glass, and textiles. About 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. Read more Toggle Crafts Mixed media Sculpture