Patina Gallery Presents.

A Retrospective
December 2025

“The inspiration is in the doing.”

Claire Kahn’s life and work were rooted in a deep understanding of how parts become whole. She was a meticulous maker, of spaces, of patterns, and of meaning.

This retrospective, Form & Light brings together a wide range of her creative depth: drawings, collages, layered papercuts, and her intricate beaded crochet jewelry. Together, they offer a portrait of an artist whose primary material, beyond ink, beads, or paper, is light.

Throughout her life, Kahn drew from a rich family history steeped in fine art and design.

Raised in the Bay Area, she was the daughter of Matt Kahn, a renowned art professor at Stanford, and Lyda Kahn, a designer and master weaver. Her grandmother, Anneke Vos-Van Thyn, a Dutch artist and principal designer with the De Stijl movement, passed down a legacy of crafted based abstraction. Claire absorbed it all. As a child, she turned everyday materials—pumpkins, shells, agates—into playful studies in form and texture. That early joy in making never left her.

Form & Light speaks to the foundation of Kahn’s practice. Her work was built upon essential principles: form, line, pattern, and, above all, light. But it reflects her commitment to eliminating the unnecessary. She allows the essential to speak. Whether abstract or representational, her compositions are never cluttered; they reveal a clarity of thought and an economy of gesture that creates space for something more to enter, something transcendent.

Her two-dimensional works display a rigor.

Often composed of layered paper, precise ink lines, or hand-cut forms, they balance the graphic with the ephemeral. Many feel architectural, echoing her early career as a designer for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Later, as Executive Designer for WET Design, she choreographed fountains as if they were dances, sculpting water and music into fluid spectacle. The idea that form and rhythm can be felt physically is present in all her later visual work.

Kahn’s jewelry reveals a more intimate side.

More than adornments, they are compositions of color and light, completed only when worn. Each piece is constructed bead by bead, a study in color gradation, texture, and touch.

This exhibition includes select personal artifacts, sketches, collected objects, and tools, offering an intimate look into the making behind the mastery. They are meditations on how parts become whole, how light reveals structure, how clarity can be quietly profound.

As you move through the gallery, a single thread reveals itself: the transformation of the parts into the extraordinary.

In memory of Claire Ruth Kahn
Artist. Designer. Maker of light.

1955 – 2023

Watch the Mindful Meditation
to accompany the exhibition.
Part I : Jewelry.

Part II : Papercuts

Part III : Works on Paper

View all Mindful Meditations

Throughout our 25-year story of extraordinary jewels, groundbreaking ingenuity surfaces in the evolving friendship and collaboration from years gone by and in those to come.

For more information on the work, please email: allison@patina-gallery.com

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MAIN IMAGE: "Untitled, Geometric Study in Color with Vellum Overlay", (Detail). All works by Claire Kahn.