Untitled

Painted shortly before his critical breakthrough at the Guggenheim Museum’s 1985 exhibition New Horizons in American Art, Tobi Kahn’s Untitled updates the mystical precedents set by American landscape painters Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) and Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919). With its roughly impastoed surface, earthy, bituminous palette, and biomorphic setting, Untitled evokes the ascetic spirituality of a desert place. The prominent brown rock-form jutting into the sky in the foreground—elementally solid—may reference the artist’s Jewish heritage and the concept of the “Rock of Israel,” an allusion to God.