Elena Von Kohn’s journey from Leipzig to Vienna comes full circle with “The Gate of Déjà Vu”

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There is an intriguing geographical symmetry in Elena Von Kohn’s latest exhibition.

Born in Leipzig, educated as an artist in Moscow and professionally established in the United States, Von Kohn has spent much of her life moving between cultures.

On October 6, 2026, that journey returns her to Central Europe as The Gate of Déjà Vu is presented at Palais Auersperg in Vienna.

For an artist whose paintings continually explore memory, coincidence, displacement and the strange sensation that the present may somehow contain traces of the past, the setting feels particularly appropriate.

“Sometimes you travel very far only to discover that you have returned to something you recognize,” Von Kohn says. “That feeling is very close to what The Gate of Déjà Vu means to me.”

Von Kohn was born in Leipzig and began painting at age three. Her artistic education eventually took her to Moscow, where she attended the Moscow Art School for Gifted Children and later received her MFA summa cum laude from Moscow State Pedagogical University Art Department. 

Her subsequent career developed across continents.

After relocating to the United States, Von Kohn continued painting while establishing herself professionally in the art field. Her work entered public, institutional and private collections, and she developed a parallel career as an art appraiser and art historian.

As an artist, Von Kohn is concerned with something valuation cannot quantify: whether a painting remains psychologically alive.

Her answer has been to develop a visual language she calls enigmatic surrealism.

The paintings typically present recognizable subjects while destabilizing their relationships. Architectural spaces bend or open unexpectedly. Objects acquire symbolic significance. Figures can appear connected to events that seem to exist outside normal chronology.

Rather than explaining those narratives, Von Kohn asks the viewer to complete them.

“People often ask me what a particular symbol means,” she says. “Sometimes I answer, but very often I prefer to ask what it means to them. Their answer can tell us much more.”

The Vienna exhibition follows an important European period for Von Kohn.

In late 2025 she spent an extended period working in Paris. In June 2026 she presented work in Paris’s Le Marais district.

Vienna continues the trajectory but changes its historical register.

At Palais Auersperg, contemporary surrealist paintings will enter an environment associated with centuries of European architecture and music.

The exhibition’s relationship with the palace’s concert setting is particularly important to Von Kohn, who sees visual art and music as parallel forms of communication.

“Music can change the meaning of a room without moving a single object,” she says. “Painting can do something similar.”

Her work is frequently large enough to alter that sense of space physically. Rather than observing a small image from a distance, viewers encounter canvases approaching architectural dimensions.

Von Kohn believes scale can change a viewer’s psychological relationship with a picture.

“You are no longer only looking at the painting,” she explains. “You begin to feel that you are standing inside its world.”

That immersive quality provides another interpretation of the exhibition’s title.

A gate is neither one place nor another. It is the threshold between them.

For Von Kohn, the metaphor encompasses geographic movement as well: Leipzig, Moscow, America, Paris and Vienna are not simply points on a biography but layers of visual memory accumulated over a lifetime.

On October 6, those layers will converge inside Palais Auersperg.

Perhaps appropriately, for an exhibition about déjà vu, the destination may also feel strangely like a return.