THK Gallery at Enter Art Fair 2022

THK Gallery is proud to present a selection of works by Gopal Dagnogo, King Houndekpinkou, Andrew Kayser, Lerato Motaung, Abdus Salaam, Lulama Wolf, and Thomas Wachholz.

 

This multidisciplinary presentation puts forth diverse creations of these different artistic voices, showcased at Booth 57 at Tunnelfabrikken, Copenhagen.

At the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and Modern African Art, Lulama Wolf interrogates the pre-colonial African experience through the contemporary mind by using smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were used in vernacular architecture, and the patterns created largely by women to decorate traditional African homes. 

"My work carries my spirit, before it carries a message. My intuition plays a vital role in the direction I go and then I compartmentalise with what I prioritise. I represent different parts of myself including abstraction, curiosity, mythology, spirituality and introspection. Blackness is vital in my work because it is created by a black woman despite the medium or language it speaks, it is vital because proof of existence is rare in the black community, information is shared but isn’t sustained in ways that are knowledgeable to us right now.I express my yearning for answers and clarity in ways that make my blackness clear even when the work is abstract. My practice embodies subtlety in a form of texture and expression, a curious mix of ambiguity and curiosity. I experiment with different textures and moulds that are formed from the earth." 

Abdus Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist from Cape Town, South Africa. With works rooted in poetry, Salaam reveals a sensitivity to three-dimensional spatial expression and the metaphysical connotations inherent in materials. 

Salaam's wood ring and natural pigment paintings are a meditation on time and place. Based on the section of a foraged tree, sliced to reveal the growth rings, he casts the rings individually in resins in incremental colour changes. Adding additional layers as though to elaborate on the millennia of life and death beyond the tree’s relatively short existence. 

Beyond the obvious cultural syncretism, Gopal Dagnogo’s paintings offer several levels of interpretation: a hybrid of aesthetics, mediation painting, and a reconciliation between the human and the sacred. His works, a tribute to the banality of the everyday, question identity, the relative and differences. They include the Sacred as an inner necessity to question human tragedy and our relationship to the world. Memory, consciousness, recollection – the obscure images challenge each other, collide or sometimes isolate themselves. 

As with a superimposition, Dagnogo tries to invent and re-enchant a contemporary mythology that emphasizes domestic paradoxes and the contradictions of a world both more civilized and more violent, more respectful and less tolerant, which makes him react with brushstrokes. 

In 2012, King Houndekpinkou's discovery of the Roku Koyo (the six ancient pottery kilns of Japan) encouraged him to visit Bizen, Japan, each year to acquire further knowledge and experience besides local potters. There, he was seduced by their spiritual and ceremonial approach to creating ceramic works, which was reminiscent of Benin’s animist cult of Voodoo. Following this epiphanic experience, he developed Terres Jumelles, a program that consists in fostering a cross-cultural dialogue between the various pottery sites of Benin and Japan through the local practices of ceramics/pottery in both countries. 

Today, King has developed a practice that merges tradition, spirituality and visceral creativity while crossing several “borders”, whether they are cultural, geographical, generational, disciplinary, technical or historical. Mainly based on the vessel shape and sculptural works, King’s practice involves blending materials (e.g.: clays, ashes, powders) from all continents. Though built on strong and proportionate shapes, his works seem disfigured by a surcharge of clay and lively textures that emulate the aesthetics of the Voodoo altars and fetishes of Benin. 

For his primary means of expression, Lerato Motaung weaves the familiar with the imagined to create a personal and intuitive evocation of history.

Drawing inspiration from his day to day life in metropolitan Johannesburg where he lives and works — as well as from memories of his youth in the North West Province and his coming of age in Katlehong township — he brings the viewer closer to grasping the intangible by pushing beyond the possibilities of the physical, and attempting to plot the unmappable parts of the human mind. 

While the intangible is present, Motaung situates his works in the corporeal world. He says, “My work is situated in an unknown time and is influenced by the past and the present”. 

Andrew Kayser displays his technical mastery in his finely detailed narrative paintings. Embracing ambiguity and contradiction, his works are both a critique and reconciliation of his coming of age, depicting saccharine suburban scenes disconnected from the larger social reality. 

Drawing on a rich pool of artistic references — from Rembrandt to Hockey — he weaves elements of fantasy into the suburban vernacular. 

Thomas Wachholz explores meanings and associations in the formal characteristics of mundane objects. Using the visual style and ideological foundations of Pop Art, Wachholz creates paintings that appropriate elements of matchboxes and matchbooks. Gathered over the years in hotels, restaurants, gas stations, cinemas and bars, the matchboxes act as ciphers, shifting the artist’s perception from the object to a specific place and time.

Wachholz’s formal abstractions are imbued with coded meanings. By removing information on the original shape and composition of a matchbox, he frees the imagery from its original context, elevating everyday objects to the realm of symbol. 

He creates a dense visual net of formal traces and personal memories, structured through opaque colour fields, where iconic symbols like stars or clouds and grids are contoured by geometric outlines. With their bright colours and clean lines, his conceptually playful paintings reveal ironic connections between both form and function, and sign and signified.