Jack Kabangu, Birds Don't Fly Without My Permission (White Bird), 2024-5, oil, acrylic, lacquer, sand, and dirt on canvas in artist's frame, 106 x 82.5 inches

Jack Kabangu
music made me do it

June 26 through August 9, 2025
Opens Thursday, June 26, 6–8pm

Harper’s Chelsea 512
512 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Tuesday–Saturday, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce Copenhagen-based artist Jack Kabangu’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, music made me do it. The presentation features new mixed-media works by Kabangu and opens June 26, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist. 

Growing up in Zambia, Kabangu was fascinated by the television series Shaka Zulu, based on the life of Shaka kaSenzangakhona, King of Southern Africa’s Zulu Empire in the nineteenth century. Today, the protagonist of Kabangu’s work is loosely inspired by the ruler and other courageous Black leaders, artists, and thinkers throughout Black history and popular culture. Amidst a kaleidoscope of free-form impasto strokes, a dreadlocked figure stars in each work within music made me do it, recalling the abstract expressionist traditions of the mid-twentieth century. 

Kabangu’s distinctive visual language is deeply influenced by music. The artist developed an interest in painting through Hip-Hop, where references to groundbreaking artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat abound. As Kabangu paints, he listens to an assortment of genres: R&B, electronic, and Congolese records enliven his studio practice, informing gestural mark-making and electric color palettes. Surrounded by energetic, improvisational brushwork, the figure in Birds Don't Fly Without My Permission (White Bird), for example, draws on these legacies—where painting becomes a space for reclaiming identity, history, and inner life on one’s own terms. The white dove, cradled gently in one hand, reads as both a personal emblem and a symbol of peace hard-won through creative defiance.

Kabangu’s paint application remains remarkably energetic in works like The Whole World Against Me 2. Here, numerous figures emerge between a deluge of warm hues: beaming yellow and milky white tones balance frenetic strokes, partitioning the canvas. Kabangu arranges these brush marks in striking geometries that recall limbs, eyes, and other facial features. On the right side of the composition, one’s gaze might wander to a sinuous figure, saturated in chalky pastels. At the top of this form, blue triangles greet a smiling crescent moon, displaying a cheery disposition on the distorted form. 

Together, Kabangu’s works foreground a vivid interplay of texture, rhythm, and emotion in this powerful New York debut. The artist’s paintings hum with chromatic intensity as he fuses instinctive gestures with a keen awareness of the traditions of abstraction and pop-art. Sweeps of dynamic color, fractured geometry, and lyrical brushwork converge to form immersive, ever-shifting terrains. His compositions reckon with chaos and clarity. Drawing from a rich matrix of musical, historical, and personal references, the artist transforms each canvas into a site of movement and memory. This is painting at its most alive: unbound, expressive, and unapologetically charged with feeling.

Jack Kabangu (b. 1996, Lusaka, Zambia) is a self-taught artist currently based in Copenhagen. Recently, his work has been the subject of presentations at Saatchi Gallery, London (2024); BEERS, London (2024); Jupiter, Miami Beach (2024); Galleri Christogger Egelunch, Copenhagen (2023 and 2022); Anzai Gallery, Tokyo (2023); and Over the Influence, Hong Kong (2021). Kabangu has participated in group exhibitions at institutions, including Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, NL (2024); Harper’s, Los Angeles (2024); Makasiini Contemporaryn, Turku, FI (2023); and Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen (2022). Reviews of his work have appeared in ELLE, Vogue Scandinavia, and Miami New Times.

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Jack Kabangu, Dirt Face Painting: Look Into My Eyes, 2025, oil, acrylic, lacquer, sand, and dirt on canvas in artist's frame, 70.75 x 51 inches

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