Kai Jenrette
Loose Rap
October 10 - November 8, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, October 10, 6-8pm
Silke Lindner is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Kai Jenrette.
Kai Jenrette’s graphite drawings on waxed newsprint over panel emerge as shapes from accumulated layers of linework. Heavy graphite rubbings counter the delicacy of his line, built up from self-made stencils.
Defying any form of categorization, the ambiguous subjects that surface from the interplay of light and dark, finelines and masses of carbon, are abstract but anchored in familiar shapes. Not quite representational but with a beat of their own, they seem to perform a secret choreography - a flex, a rhythmic pose.
The elegant contours are akin to architectural drawings or blue prints, their precision disrupted by torn paper, patched with tape or pieces of yellow newsprint; smudged by the mark of a finger. Instead of transmitting information about scale, space, and structure, their diagrammatic fragments fail - or refuse- to perform the ‘right’ way, their surfaces marked with signs of breakage and repair.
In a new series of modular wooden sculptures wrapped in belts, the suggestion of a body emerges—mimicking human experience and sensation. Loose Rap reflects on the parallels between self and object, each assembled through constraint, rupture, and persistence. Navigating limitations and surroundings, Jenrette maps a language of effort, failure, and transformation that echo the rhythms of becoming.
Kai Jenrette (b. 2001 in Atlanta, GA) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY. He has exhibited at Derosia, New York, NY; Mamoth, London, UK; LVL3, Chicago, IL; April April, Pittsburgh, PA; White Columns, New York, NY; and My Perfect Environment, Chicago, IL. He recently completed a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and published I’M PERFECT LIFE’S PERFECT I LOVE BEING ME with Du-Good Press, Brooklyn. Other past publications include KENNY + PENNY, recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art Library.