LYJE

Tobi Kahn’s painting LYJE (1991) can be situated in the tradition that began with Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Albert Pinkham Ryder: extracting the essence of natural forms in painting. By 1984, Kahn’s work was dominated by landscapes as reflected in memory. In the 1990s, however, other forms, such as flowers, are often suggested in his paintings; LYJE is one of the artist’s most important paintings from that period. Painted on board and built up from more than twenty layers of acrylic paint, the work is nearly two inches thick. The brown and red leaflike shapes wrap around the top and left edges of the painting.