Modfellows presents "The Curve of the Current" by painter Martin Kahnle

Modfellows is proud to exhibit works by painter Martin Kahnle in his second solo

exhibition at Modfellows. He will be presenting his new wave American landscapes on

canvas. Over the last two years, Kahnle has been developing a body of landscape

paintings in Flashe, a vinyl paint with a flat, matte finish and a vivid, high-color presence

that pushes the works into a different visual language. The surface is drier, flatter, and

more graphic than oil, and that shift opened something up for Kahnle. The works

became bolder, more distilled, and a little stranger-in the best way.

These paintings begin in the landscapes of Tennessee, North Georgia, and the broader

Southeast, but they are not trying to document a place literally. Kahnle is more

interested in the emotional truth of a landscape-how it feels in memory, how color can

sharpen it, bend it, and make it more itself than realism ever could. The easiest way to

describe this body of work is probably as a romantic fling between David Hockney and a

classic Warner Bros. cartoon. Somehow, they had a love child and sent it wandering

through the American South. That may sound playful, but it is close to the truth. Kahnle

has always loved the clean confidence of modern painting and the heightened,

emotionally exact artificiality of classic cartoon backgrounds. Both understand that a

landscape can be stylized and still feel completely real. The Curve of the Current marks

an important new turn in his works.