Kai Jenrette: Tenacity

Kai Jenrette

Tencity

27th June — 09th August 2025

MAMOTH is delighted to present Tenacity, the first UK solo exhibition by New York-based artist Kai Jenrette — on view from 27 June 2025. 

Jenrette’s work uses the language of craft and design to explore how we construct identity through making. The pieces strive to become themselves—just as people do—navigating constraints, surroundings, and ideals of appearance. They are drawings trying to live their lives as drawings, with the same confusion, effort, and hope that comes with being human.

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KAI JENRETTE ON TENACITY

I am listening to a piece of paper. We are deep in conversation sharing jokes and secrets, learning each other with each line spoken and drawn. We are attentive and ambitious in our dialogue. We are trying to figure each other out. We’re making a jazz record and finding new freedoms in restraint. We are determined amidst bad conditions. We’re pushing at the corners, redacting, and creasing. We are picking out an outfit. We are trying to look not pretty or handsome or hot but like ourselves. All we can decide is that there are infinite possibilities.

I am a result of attracting miracles. A modest messenger with a quiet voice and conviction. An amateur truth seeker. Three children stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. A contradiction and an affirmation. I’m memorizing something to forget it. A riff on a closed notion. Improvised agency. Romance, the possibility of a thing. Flirting, covered in graphite, always at least two things at once crawling across the table trying to feel something. I’m taking all my clothes off and giving them to a friend. Shedding my experience in your direction.

I am chasing wind. I wear my smile and nothing else. Hair dancing, bare feet beating pavement, I cannot be stopped. I am stubborn and sincere. Sweaty and wide-eyed, confidently moving towards something. There is confetti in my lungs and trumpets in my ears. Tinsel in my lashes and joy settling in my throat. The sun cheers me on as I run after the breeze. We are happy and confused and laughing. A new but familiar type of freedom. Behaving beautifully under insane circumstances.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kai Jenrette (b.2001, Baltimore, MD) lives and works in New York, USA. Jenrette received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art. In 2024, he participated in the Haystack Open Studio Residency in Maine.

Recent exhibitions include Sprocket at LVL3, Chicago (2025); To Be Seen By Heavy Eyes at Silke Lindner, New York (2025); Muffler at April April, Pittsburgh (2024); Benefit Show at White Columns, New York (2024); real bad at The Cooper Union, New York (2023); exy ilence at The Cooper Union, New York (2023), among others.

Jenrette’s work has been featured in LVL3 Chicago, i-D Magazine, Common Discourse, and Are.na. In 2024, Jenrette was awarded the Pietro and Alfrieda Montana Prize for Excellence in Drawing from The Cooper Union. Jenrette works KENNY + PENNY (2023) and I'm Perfect Life's Perfect... (2024) have been acquired by the National Gallery of Art Library.