Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Gabriel Kohn studied in New York and Paris between 1929 and 1934. Until the late 1950s he lived and worked mostly in France and Italy. He returned to America in 1961 and settled in California, where he maintained a studio and taught sculpture in La Jolla and San Francisco. He had his first one-person exhibition in 1951 and was the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant in 1960.
His work is characterized by a simplicity of line and shape, in which the arrangement of the forms conveys a provocative and dynamic equilibrium.
[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion program to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art. Produced by the Department of Education Resources, this teaching resource is one of the Gallery's free-loan educational programs.]