By Angela Cordoba Perez
Artist Elena Von Kohn opened L’Instant du Rêve (The Moment of the Dream), a major exhibition of new figurative paintings, at Galerie Joseph in Paris on June 10. The presentation introduces Von Kohn’s monumental work to a European audience and marks her most significant institutional-scale showing on the continent to date, following two decades of international exhibition.
Exhibition And Works On View
The exhibition assembles a recent series of large-scale figurative paintings, most centered on the female form. Von Kohn describes her practice as enigmatic surrealism, a style she distinguishes from historical Surrealism: rather than dream-imagery as subject, the work renders psychological atmosphere through classically trained figuration. Compositions are technically precise and emotionally unresolved, a tension the artist treats as deliberate.
“Paris feels less like a debut and more like a continuation,” Von Kohn said of the show. “The emotional and visual language behind this work was born from a European tradition.”
The opening date positions the exhibition within the early-summer European art calendar, when curatorial visits and collector activity converge on the city. Galerie Joseph is located in the Marais district of Paris.
Artist Background And Trajectory
Von Kohn was born in Leipzig, Germany, and received her academic training in Moscow before relocating to the United States, where she has maintained studios in Scottsdale, Arizona, and San Diego, California. Her practice has developed across two continents, with the technical foundation rooted in European classical training and the mature body of work produced in the U.S.
The Paris exhibition continues a trajectory that has steadily moved Von Kohn’s work into international consideration. Her paintings are held in museum, corporate, and private collections in the United States and abroad. In 2023, one of her monumental figurative paintings achieved a record result at Wright Auction House in Chicago, a signal that has registered in the secondary market.
Market And Critical Context
Von Kohn’s combination of restricted supply and a coherent visual language has produced a collector base that tends toward long-hold acquisition rather than speculative trading, a pattern the artist’s representatives describe as characteristic of figurative painters whose work is read as serious by both collectors and institutions.
Her presence in institutional collections across the United States has provided a documented acquisition history that informs how dealers and auction specialists assess an artist’s standing. That record, built over two decades, now travels with the work as it moves into the European market for the first time at scale.
The Paris show arrives at a moment of renewed institutional interest in figurative painting across European museums and commercial galleries. Within that conversation, Von Kohn’s work stands out for the integration of classical technique with contemporary psychological subject matter. The artist’s term — enigmatic surrealism — has begun to circulate as a useful descriptor among critics and dealers seeking language for figurative work that holds technical rigor without sliding into either pastiche or narrative illustration.
L’Instant du Rêve is on view at Galerie Joseph, Paris.
