A self-taught artist, Jack Kabangu works with acrylic, oil stick and oil pastels, using his fingers, spatulas and brushes. He builds up dynamically textured surfaces revealing a wide range of approaches to mark-making — scraping, scratching, scumbling — and then blocks out his figures with an opaque ground.
Kabangu’s searching, expressive passages are grounded by a confident, graphic line that often forms a halo around the hairstyles of his subjects. His palette of pastel pink, robin’s egg blue, orange, Kelly green, crimson and black lends his canvases an ecstatic Pop quality. By incorporating both celebratory and derogatory historical references, Kabangu offers a meditation on identity and expression that welcomes the transfiguring potential of abstraction.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.”
Kabangu found inspiration on the Danish island of Fanø and its traditional dress culture, thus reminiscing his childhood in Zambia. This observation revealed an ambivalent condition in which familiarity and learned knowledge coexist with a sense of foreignness, which he first experienced when he moved to Denmark at the age of nine. Western culture and its elements had already appeared close to him through school, stories, music and film, yet physically arriving in Denmark transformed that familiarity into something simultaneously unrecognizable and at times unsettling. The same tension has been seen in his relationship with art. Art began as a private, internal space — a place of retreat. Over time, as that space opened to others, it became exposed and vulnerable, carrying desire as well as fear. In retrospect, imagination has emerged as a central mechanism for Kabangu in navigating this tension. His works revolve around this hesitant attachment to place, identity, and belonging. They consider what happens when familiar routines are displaced, when traditions are carried into new contexts and when the body becomes the site where memory, loss, curiosity and fear coexist.
Jack Kabangu’s works have been exhibited at e.g. Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands as well as gallery exhibitions in Europe and the USA. His works can be found in numerous private collections.
