THK Gallery Presents Jake Michael Singer

THK Gallery is a dynamic contemporary art gallery situated in the heart of Cape Town, South Africa, with an experimental space in Cologne, Germany.
Founded by German photographer and collector Frank Schönau in 2018, who was joined by auctioneer Linda Pyke. Working with established and emerging artists from Africa and the diaspora, as well as international artists, it presents a diverse array of developing contemporary visual art forms.

It contributes to the contemporary art discourse by showcasing, to a global audience, art that presents alternative perspectives and aesthetics.

JAKE MICHAEL SINGER

Jake Michael Singer (b. 1991, Johannesburg) is a transdisciplinary artist coalescing sculpture, photography, and painting, in a practice centred around materiality, myth and catharsis.


Most recently Singer has focused on large scale site-specific installations in the historically significant edifices of Istanbul Yedikule Hisarı (during the 17th Istanbul Biennal, 2022) and Küçük Mustafa Pasa Hamamı (2021).

Institutional exhibitions include Zeitz MOCAA, Norval Foundation, Nirox Foundation, Kampala Biennale, Dakart, South-African-National-Gallery, DTIC Dubai, Nirox Foundation and Istanbul Biennale (forthcoming).

Solo exhibitions include Gallery Tiny, New York (2020), THK Gallery, Cape Town (2019), Matter Gallery Toronto (2018), Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), 50 Golbourne, London (2017), Punt WG, Amsterdam (2017), Hazard Gallery, Johannesburg (2016).


Singer holds a degree from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (2013) and has studied at Central Saint Martins, London. He was the recipient of the Edoardo Villa Foundation Grant in 2016 and 2017, the youngest artist to receive this, and the only artist to receive it twice.

Permanent public sculptures include ‘Dawn Chorus’ (2019), Johannesburg; ‘Roark’s Evacuation Plan’ (2016), Johannesburg and Flume, Istanbul (forthcoming). Singer has completed residencies in Istanbul, Amsterdam, Kampala and Cologne.

Singer and THK Gallery co-founded the Emergence Art Prize with Rand Merchant Bank in support of emerging artists in South Africa.

We will meet again in the field
Ashraf Jamal

Words spoken by his uncle, following the death of his father, become the gesture, the parting curtain, an invitation to Jake Michael Singer’s exhibition – ‘We will meet again in the field’ / ‘Ons sal weer in die veld ontmoet’. A solace, a promise, a consolation, these words are intended to heal. But they are also mortally perplexing, because, beyond hope, beyond belief, there lies no certainty. This quandary, however, is not Singer’s. Doubt is not circumspection. And uncertainly is as exotic as it is beautiful. Few artists combine an unknowing yet knowing agency as well as Singer. His sculptures and his paintings allow for both.

Echoing the Bhagavad Gita, Singer speaks of ‘The field and the knower of the field’, nature and consciousness, spirit and being. All is one. Even in a world as degraded as ours, as abased, there remains an eternal continuance, despite ever-shifting form. It is this spirit and principle that anchors the radical fragility of Singer’s sculptures and paintings. Never adamantine, never quite certain, Singer’s creatures, or phenomena, take flight, hurtle, plunge, pivot, teeter. Ever gestural, never nominal, his sculptures and paintings speak to our mortality – the field we long to return to, from which we might be forever exiled, or to which we might return. This lack of certainty is not speculative openness; it is the artist’s fundament. How protective is belief? In a maelstrom, is it not better to abandon what holds one prisoner?

In Singer’s work precarity is key. The centre holds yet doesn’t. A fulcrum is as inspired as it is expedient. There is no known core to the universe, a being, an object – matter. We sense this when we encounter Singer’s sculptures. They are ascendent, it is true, but they are as bonded, as earthed. This is because, for Singer, we remain caught between worlds. The wonder and beauty that his works elicit, stems from this brutally tender realization. We see it in the paintings too. In the tumult that writhes through them. In a topographical meltdown, the sky a fission flare, the aqueous earth a shiver. Roiling cloud. Molten land.

As we walk through Singer’s Johannesburg studio, from his flashing electric blue world of welded steel to his quiet yet restless realm of paintings, it is the desire to connect structure and passion that matters most. It is worth noting, here, that welding sparks are incandescent particles, reaffirming the synergy of solidity and the atomic, substance and its intrinsic mystery. In his outstretched hand Singer holds a shard of smelted sludge, its sculptural delineation wondrous. With Singer as my guide, I’m reminded of the lines from James Blake’s song, I’ll Come Too … ‘I’ll go under your wing / I’ll slot right in between the / Cracks between’…