Born 1996 I Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark
Jack Kabangu’s bold, gestural canvases remix various painterly traditions to arrive at a singular figurative style. His paintings are populated by iconic, bust-like forms that recall African tribal masks, nineteenth-century racialized caricatures, and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. His figures have oversized, ovoid eyes and lips, their pupils narrowed into vertical slits, seemingly to evade eye contact. The Copenhagen-based artist, who was born in Zambia in 1996 and is self-taught, works intuitively, channeling memories and hip-hop lyrics into his process. His palette of pastel pink, robin’s egg blue, orange, Kelly green, crimson, and black lends his canvases an ecstatic Pop quality.
Kabangu works with acrylic, oil stick, and oil pastels, using his fingers, spatulas, and brushes. He builds up dynamically textured surfaces that reveal a wide range of approaches to mark-making — scraping, scratching, scumbling — and then blocks out his figures with an opaque ground. His searching, expressive passages are grounded by a confident, graphic line that often forms a halo around the hairstyles of his subjects. By incorporating both celebratory and derogatory historical references, Kabangu offers a meditation on identity and expression that welcomes the transfiguring potential of abstraction. The resulting works hearken to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti figures and the anxious men of Rashid Johnson’s paintings, but also to the primitivism of Jean Dubuffet. “I work without rules,” the artist explains. “My mission is to find a balance between the ugly and the beautiful, the light and the dark. To create an energy that speaks to me.”
