Kai Althoff at Anton Kern - New York - Brief Article

Art in America, July, 2002 by Susan Harris

The dark, provocative tone of Kai Althoff's second solo show in New York stayed in one's mind. The exhibition consisted of 30 modest-size works installed with no apparent visual or narrative thread, as well as one sculpture consisting of two chairs and a sword. Althoff mingled figurative and abstract, high and low, and mediums of various sorts. There were paintings on paper mounted on canvas, photos of paintings, paintings on photographs, woodcuts and photos of drawings.

Althoff's eclecticism of style and medium was a clever and deliberate strategy. He jumped from a woodcut of a rooster, to a manipulated, plastic-encased photograph of students in a bar, to delicate paintings of Germanic-looking males engaged in ambiguous and possibly malevolent activities, to photographs of crude drawings of wide-eyed faces, to generic abstract paintings, to paintings of Jesus Christ--leaving the viewer to speculate on the meaning of and relationship between works.

Althoff's paintings are eerily beautiful, displaying delicate mastery of line, color and form, while their subjects veer toward the strange and macabre. The dark, varnished surfaces exude a quaint, old-fashioned air that is underscored by the characters he borrows from German folklore and history. In one work, two students with suspicious expressions hold onto each other as they walk in a sinister night landscape with a mysterious figure lurking in the background. In a painting of a foreshortened, claustrophobic interior, a large man tends to his bedridden companion in an affecting scene that harks back to Dutch and German genre painting. In other works, Prussian soldiers beat a man; an unconscious, half-naked man is left lying in the snow; a shrieking, demonic figure yanks a tablecloth and its contents out from under companions whose visages imitate those in works by the German Expressionists; teenagers witness a strangling. These unsettling scenes of psychological and sociohistorical aggression colored one's reading of the other works, and of the show as a whole.

For the fugitive photographs, the haunted drawings, the tormented Jesus works and the cloudy abstractions, the common denominator was, of course, Althoff himself and his native German landscape and heritage. All these works added up to a disconcerting autobiographical portrait, a glimpse, however oblique, into the artist's idiosyncratic inner world.