Born in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1996, Jack Kabangu now lives in Copenhagen. He is part of a generation of African creatives who transcend traditional notions of identity, asserting a distinct artistic and poetic voice.

A self-taught artist, Kabangu’s diasporic background, curiosity, and openness to diverse influences have shaped a wholly unique creative universe. Free from preconceived rules, his work is guided by self-devised methodologies marked by symbology, metaphor, and gestural dynamics that evoke tribal neo-ritualism, syncopated musical rhythms, and a pursuit of harmonizing opposites.

Kabangu’s paintings reconcile the sublime with the grotesque, light with darkness, memory with imagined futures. He masterfully combines acrylic, oil, and pastel to choreograph a vibrant chromatic spectrum—from pastel pink and sugar-paper blue to orange, leaf green, crimson, and black—applied with brushes, palette knives, and fingers to evoke ecstatic, pop-infused vitality.

Drawing on childhood memories, ancestral influences, urban life, and Norse mythology, Kabangu transforms the canvas into an expressive diary, giving physical form to dreams, sounds, words, and sensations. His work engages with the past while creating critical distance, blending memory with contemporary experience, and reflecting the post-blackness generation defined by Glenn Ligon and Martha Golden.

Technically and stylistically, Kabangu merges action painting, abstract expressionism, and graffiti, nodding to Basquiat, Rammelzee, Futura 2000, Haring, and Dubuffet. His compositions balance figuration and abstraction, instinct and refinement, in works that are at once expressive, performative, and synesthetic—uniting visual and auditory art in a dynamic urban idiom.

Kabangu’s practice is both aesthetic and ethical, subverting Western stereotypes of Africa and exploring facial anatomy through fantastical yet perceptually grounded forms. His evolving visual syntax defies categorization, embracing experimentation, metamorphosis, and wonder, making his work an ever-growing language of contemporary art.