Royal Specter, an exhibition of new paintings by Kajahl, his first exhibition with the gallery and in Chicago.
Emerging within the 17th-19th centuries, Europe’s most prestigious sculptors and painters were commissioned to create depictions in the form of decorative objects known as the Blackamoor. During a time of colonial expansion and exploration, these objects satisfied and appeased the illusions of the elite and their desire to learn about the ‘specter’ residing in unknown territories, –who were these people and what did they look like? Displaying a mixture of factual documentation and pure fantasy, the artists who imaged the Blackamoor took liberties when imagining what they presumed to be these “others” from uncharted lands. In many cases the iconography was derived from written text or engravings from the distant past, the artists themselves often had no contact with the mythical subjects they were attempting to accurately characterize.
