Introducing the BGWC Collaborating Artist Zak Kitnick
Every year, we aim to make the Backgammon World Championship more exciting, more prestigious, and more attractive to an even wider audience of backgammon players and enthusiasts.
This year, BGWC is excited to announce that we have partnered with internationally exhibited fine artist Zak Kitnick to create a World Championship experience like we have never had before.
Zak is an American artist living in New York City whose paintings and sculptures are in the collections of major museums including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO), Geneva, and many others.
His work has been featured and covered in the mainstream press such as The New York Times and The New Yorker as well as in major art world journals such as Artforum and Frieze.
An amateur backgammon player himself, Zak introduced the motif of game into his art practice in 2018 with an exhibition titled DOUBLES, which included wall paintings and table sculptures that transformed into playable backgammon boards. His interest in and devotion to the game has only grown in the intervening years, with aspects of the game board making its way into new sculptures and paintings that have been widely exhibited and collected.
This year, Zak is taking that work to a new level. For BGWC, the artist is designing and handcrafting – with input from Mochy! – a luxury tabletop championship board on which this year’s finalists in Monte Carlo will play!
It will be a playable work of art, and a testament to the way we at BGWC think about backgammon when it is played at the highest level – an elite craft that combines strategy and deliberate thinking– a game that is beautiful to both watch and play. Backgammon is like art, the more you know about it, the more interesting it is!
As the definition of a collector's item, the board will be available for acquisition after the tournament. Zak will also be making a limited edition of nine boards of similar design and quality that will be offered exclusively through BGWC and Backgammon Galaxy.
Mochy visiting Zak’s workshop
The playing surface has bonded leather, then a goat skin from France by Alran leather which is the same leather supplier used by the highest luxury leather brands. The checkers are a standard lightweight aluminum with 'caviar textured' goat leather also from Alran. The gray is an amazing Grade 1 ostrich that has a pleasant feel on the hand and body that won't interfere with the playing surface.
From metal works to paintings to the board prototypes, Zak’s practice lives and breathes our game. Recently, Mochy visited Zak in the studio and found himself immersed in a world of backgammon-inspired fine art. It was the perfect backdrop for the two craftsmen to test the playability of the prototype, everything from the rigidity of the cups and the sound of the dice to the texture of the surface and the feel of the checkers. With input from Mochy and Marc Olsen from Backgammon Galaxy, no detail except for the roll of the dice is left to chance.
That's not all. As a testament to his own devotion to the game, Zak is converting one of his own metal marquetry backgammon works into this year’s championship trophy. Made from bronze, brass, copper, stainless steel, and galvanized steel, it is the only remaining work from a series that Zak has been holding onto for his own collection (the others belong to major art collectors). It will be a fitting crown for this year's champion. As if the competition couldn't get any more fierce.
And if this wasn't enough, Zak is creating four new paintings for BGWC that will be on display during the tournament and championship game. Based on the backgammon board itself, and with subtle nods to the circuit and movement of play, these original works continue Zak's ongoing series of backgammon-based paintings that have found their way into significant collections and institutions, including the 11 large-format works that Zak was recently commissioned to create for Colette, one of New York City's newest and most exclusive business clubs which is opening on the 37th floor of 767 Fifth Avenue, aka the GM Building.
We could not be more thrilled to begin this multi-year collaboration with Zak. We will be sharing more photos of the works and the board as the tournament approaches. If you are interested in acquiring one of the limited-edition boards, please email zakfineart@bwcmc.com.