Hit Combo
When it comes to creativity, Jan Kath does not hesitate. Inspiration lurks everywhere and so spontaneous impressions soon become an international carpet trend. Traditional patterns are broken up, saturated with high-contrast or tone-on-tone colours, and materials are creatively and newly mixed.
Jan Kath’s new collection is based on motifs by the photo artist Raphael Brunk.
It was the 1970s when arcade games took off. Starting in the USA, slot machines captivated video gamers worldwide. Insert a coin and off we go.
‘Insert Coin’ is also the name of the latest collection by carpet artist Jan Kath. The hand-knotted carpets are based on images by photo artist Raphael Brunk, who in this case creatively turned screenshots of arcade computer games into art objects.
In fact, although the works in the Insert Coin series are about arcade games, the screen displays are so far processed – electronically, that the motif is no longer recognisable. Decomposed into all its pixels, the shot eventually becomes the colour palette of something completely new and serves as a pattern for knotting a carpet.
Jan Kath interprets this template and brings the approximately 1.7 million pixels back into the real world – knot by knot.
Taking up what already exists, alienating it and developing it into something new with a great sense of beauty is Jan Kath’s credo.