Rare Gallery is pleased to present Pagan Knights & The Vertigo, Philadelphia artist Kevin Mack's first solo show in New York. Neither fully painting nor sculpture, Mack's skillfully and meticulously crafted works afford a dizzying sensory experience of color, form, and content. Although the works appear to be driven by a figure-ground relationship, the subjects seem to focus on the ironies of the conversation taking place among the disparate elements comprising each piece as well as among the works themselves.

By blurring the line between painting and sculpture, paying the same attention to the crafting of stretcher bars as he does to what is painted on or over them, and imparting as much importance to a limited and controlled palette as he does to a luxurious one that has a complete disregard for planned color, Mack offers up works that emanate an internal logic and visual rhythm all their own.

While the overall visual experience of the exhibition may be that of stumbling upon a vertiginous jungle gym or prehistoric toy store, Mack also gives us "gallery as church" for the most unlikely of conversations and services - revolving around the game of basketball. He utilizes a vocabulary of symbols both knowable and obscure and treats each work like a sacred object, creating an iconic arrangement to set up the gallery in a way that could be accepted as a religious space. Is Mack elevating basketball players to saint- or god-like status, is he commenting on misplaced idolatry, or is he using the iconography of a sport he loves to activate the space of his imagination and ours?

In 2013, Mack received a BFA, with a major in sculpture, from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. That same year he participated in group shows at the Moore College of Art & Design, Crane Arts, and James Oliver Gallery, all in Philadelphia. Pagan Knights & The Vertigo marks the artist's exhibition debut in New York.