CHARLES BANK GALLERY is pleased to present Blackboard Jungle, a solo exhibition by Danish artist Eske Kath. For this new series of paintings, Kath has used blackboards, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, as the foundation for each painting. Blackboard Jungle is a project based on Kath’s artistic exploration on the idea of how we are all bound, and yet still able to respond, to the basic laws of nature.
Blackboard Jungle asks the viewer if life is as free as we perceive it, or if our freedom is just an illusion based on a grid of natural laws. The theme of the exhibition will be further explored in a performance piece that will occur on the opening night of the show, performed by Kath himself and by Danish singer-songwriter Oh Land, and drummer Mikkel Hess.
The blackboard is used in the paintings as a symbol of science’s quest to uncover truth itself. The actual painted parts of the work, however, suggest an organic but limited freedom of life. In order to understand and appreciate freedom, one has to have known and experience limitations. It is the limitations imposed in the work that allow for freedom to occur in the act of painting. Most of the compositional chalk drawings consist of ring systems that, among others, refer to illustrations of gravity, solar systems, and wave movement in physics. By applying further rules and limitations to the paintings, such as the sizes defined by wood standards, and the way the painted areas are defined by the underlying compositional drawings, Kath was shown new ways of approaching the work.
The stories and imagery in the paintings are a mixture of references to science, nature, myth and the fragile structures of mankind. But the basic story is maintained in the method itself: By painting permanent images or cutting out figurations into blackboards, Kath circumvents the rules of the blackboard as a defined media. The paintings do obey the rules set by the basic composition, but do not obey to the rules of the medium/blackboard itself.
A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Eske Kath is a multi-year recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation Grant. In 2009, he was commissioned to paint a chamber ceiling in the Crown Prince of Denmark’s Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen. His work is in the collections of the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, the ARoS Museum of Contemporary Art, Eksport Kredit Fonden in Copenhagen, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wien, Austria, among others.
For further information please contact Gina Fraone, 212.219.4095, or gina@charlesbankgallery.com.