Composition Surrealiste

Aharon Kahana

Painter, printmaker, and ceramicist Aharon Kahana was born on March 1, 1905 in Stuttgart, Germany. His art education took place from 1922 - 1925 at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart, where he focused on ceramics in addition to traditional art studies, and later studied at the Academy in Berlin. Following graduation he traveled to Paris to study old masters as well as the work of his contemporaries at leading galleries. He emigrated to Ramat Gan, Israel in 1935, and would become one of the founders of the important Israeli art movement, New Horizons, which focused on Abstraction, which he had returned to in 1943.

Aharon Kahana’s later work began to embrace simplicity, moving away from a brief period of realism and classical composition to abstraction. By now he had founded and been a part of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) Israeli art movement for thirteen years, working with various modern artists to establish a style that reflected contemporary Jewish modernism. During this time his work not only took on a Cubistic, minimalist feel, but it reflected the work he had established in ceramics: bold, hinting at Primitive, and saturated with glowing color. “Composition Surrealiste” beautifully illuminates his particular style.