Artist's work inspired by living in the Bay Area
Mixed Media Master
By Shari Kaplan
"Sugar-lift, ground aquatint, etching, engraving, embossing, chine collé with silver leaf, metal-type engraving, rainbow-roll and color woodcut."
While this may sound like the ingredient list for some fantastic recipe of the future, it is actually simply a listing of the media used by prolific artist Misch Kohn in Blow Up Your Balloon and Tie with an E, one of his many abstract, mixed media works on display through Feb. 25 at the Gallery at Villa Montalvo, 15400 Montalvo Road in Saratoga. All of his collage-like works are crafted by various methods and techniques of print-making, Kohn's forté.
"Misch Kohn: The California Years" is part of a major retrospective exhibition titled "Misch Kohn: Beyond the Tradition," which spans 60 years of the artist's works. It's accompanied by a video and large hardcover book of the same name, both of which are available at Montalvo.
Jo Farb Hernandez, director of the Thompson Gallery at San Jose State University, is the curator of both the smaller Montalvo show and the larger national one. She also wrote the nearly 300-page coffee-table book about Kohn, which also contains a large number of color reproductions of his work over the years.
Kohn was born in 1916 in Kokomo, Ind. He lived and traveled in many states before settling in the Bay Area, his home since 1972, and his inspiration for the prints in this "California Years" collection. Among his notable stops along the way are a year in Mexico--where he rubbed elbows with artistic luminaries such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco; and Illinois, where he spent 22 years as director of the Graphic Workshop at Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus Institute of Design, located in Chicago.
Although Kohn's colorful and temptingly tactile artwork is a bit difficult to describe literally, figuratively it is easier--according to the excerpt of a quote posted at the gallery from Gene Baro, curator of the Brooklyn Museum in New York:
"Looking at Kohn's California prints can be like opening the shutters on a brilliant morning, when the whole scene is energized, articulated and dissolved in the vibrancy of air and light."
Among the prints that gallery visitors can view in this light are Blue Labyrinth, The Enormous Room, Party Line, Canyon II, Alaska Highlands, Black Warrior Basin, I Can't Go On; I'll Go On, Examined by 6 and Transformations and Reflections on 8. A handful of untitled pieces are also part of the mix. The titles may be of some help in relating to Kohn's prints, but an open, imaginative mind is even better.
Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call 408.961.5813, or visit www.villamontalvo.org on the Internet.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
