July 17 - August 9, 2025
Dena Kahan's newest body of work transforms the still life genre into a reflection on mortality, the seductive allure of collecting and our attraction to the macabre. Known for her finely detailed and meticulously rendered paintings, Kahan draws on her background as both an artist and museum conservator to explore the visual language of scientific collections, artefacts and the delicate architecture of the display case.
In Collecting, Kahan invites viewers into a world where museum specimens, anatomical models and antique instruments hover somewhere between strangely scientific and beautifully poetic. Each work is both a study and a fiction, the result of her extensive visual research into museums and private collections, coupled with her unique engagement with materiality.
While echoing the aesthetics of museum taxonomies, Kahan infuses her compositions with subtle distortions, layered reflections and uncanny juxtapositions that quietly disrupt the authority and order of the display case.
