Misha Kahn was born in 1989 in Duluth, Minnesota. Kahn’s pieces exist at the intersection of design and sculpture and create an interplay between the conceptual and the practical to explore everything from small organic shapes to residential, exterior, and imaginary spaces in a variety of media and on assorted scales. The artist’s unique process infuses the traditional work of casting, sculpting, welding and textile production with his own distinctively playful imagination.
Read MoreMisha Kahn’s works move freely across artistic binaries like form and concept, aesthetics and functionality in pursuit of avante-garde artistic forms. These works are products of the harmony reached between Kahn’s impressive craftsmanship with glass and bronze casting and his eclectic materials. The artist collects and transforms pieces of scrap metal from trash that has been discarded on the beach and experiments with them to draw out the forms desired by the material. He is simultaneously building a world of his own by relentlessly exploring and arriving at new styles. Kahn’s approach to design offers a glimpse at an openness that transcends the binaries of art and design or existence and essence.
Misha Kahn’s surrealistic forms were heavily influenced by artisans he met when he traveled the world. Spending his youth in Belgium, he traveled to the Middle East and later received the Fulbright Fellowship, the world’s most prestigious international scholarship program for promising scholars and professionals in America, to study fashion, props, and design under the guidance of a master artisan at Israel’s Bezalel Academy. Inspired by his time working with Vincent Darre, an interior designer and the former creative director of MOSCHINO, on his surrealist designs, Kahn expanded and deepened his practice with glass while receiving full support for his work at New Jersey’s CGCA (Creative Glass Center of America), the birthplace of the American glass industry. Though his creative process may appear spontaneous, his thorough familiarity with his material allows him to continue pushing the envelope. Misha Kahn’s work encompasses openness and innovation and has received high praise for leading trends with the daring attempts he makes in his design and production process.
Text courtesy The Page Gallery.