The Bettie and Samuel Roberts Jewish Art Lectureship

"Distilled Beauty: The Art of Tobi Kahn"

Tobi Kahn - a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown in more than 70 solo exhibitions and more than 60 museum and group shows since he was selected as one of nine artists to be included in the 1985 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition, “New Horizons in American Art.”

To create art is natural, an act in the image of the Creator, whose materials are light and darkness, generative and reflecting luminosities, and their attendant color and shadow. Art begins in the capacity to see, a mode of knowing the world and its Maker that is indispensable to the religious and cultural expression of a people.

For Tobi, the life of the spirit is integrally bound to the beauty of the world. Rather than being forbidden, beauty in praise of the Creator is given an honored place. The name of the Tabernacle’s chief artist, Betzalel, means “in the shadow of God,” for his work is understood to be divinely inspired.

Tobi’s works are not a rupture from the past; they express the past’s living possibilities in the idiom of abstraction. They make visible a preoccupation with art and holiness, a quest to distill what we remember into essential images, archetypes that allow the past to be transformed by imagination into a capacious future, a resonant sanctuary in a still struggling world.

Excerpted from the book accompanying the exhibition Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21^st Century, published by MOBIA and D Giles Limited London, 2009

Co-Sponsored with Open Visions Forum and Fairfield University Art Museum

Tuesday, April 8, 2025 7:30pm

BCC Dogwood Room