Aunia Kahn

Aunia Kahn is a contemporary artist and curator working across gouache, acrylic, colored pencil, and dimensional mixed media, creating layered compositions that weave personal narrative with rich cultural symbolism.

Recognized as the originator of Contemporary Symbolist Folk, a lineage rooted in symbolic depth and personal mythos, Kahn draws from French Canadian, German, Polish and Scandinavian folk traditions, Pre-Raphaelite and Surrealist lineages, and the natural world to create a visual language entirely her own. Her paintings explore sanctuary, transformation, and the threshold between life and death, articulated through a recurring iconography of women, animals, and nature, rendered in a saturated palette and dense ornamentation evocative of folk textile and decorative traditions. Having lived through years of life-threatening illness, Kahn approaches this liminal space not as abstraction but as personal terrain, giving her work a rare emotional authority.