Kai Althoff

Kai Altoff

b. Cologne, Germany. 1966.

B a s e d   i n   the city of his birth ,  Althoff emerged in Germany in the early 1990’s as an artist working extensively across a range of mediums including performance, painting, drawing, installation, videos, text, photography, literary writing, sculpture, and music (Althoff’s band, Workshop was formed in the early 90’s).  Althoff  exhibts his work both nationally and internationally, and has gained recognition primarily for his paintings and collaborative works.  Never having attended art school, Althoff has no studio but instead works out of his two-bedroom apartment in Cologne, for which he reasons that there needn’t be any separation between living and his art practice.

Althoff’s performances often take place within installations, which consist of his sculptures and paintings, and draw heavily upon dramatic improvisational techniques.  The performances are often collaborative efforts, with Althoff performing among a democratic cast, with no central character and a shifting and subversive narrative.  The sculptures and paintings become props to be employed, imbuing them with metaphorical power, in which they are engaged as active players.

From November 2008 to February 2009, Althoff held his first Canadian exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.  Althoff’s self-titled exhibition was co-curated by gallery director, Kathleen Bartels and guest curator Jennifer Volland.  Bartels saw Althoff’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago first in 2004 and then again at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2007.  Rumor has it that it was in fact Jeff Wall who first discovered the work of Althoff, and encouraged Bartels to invite Althoff to show at the VAG. 

During the exhibition, the second floor was filled with a collection of 38 drawings and paintings dating back to Althoff’s early practice in the 1990’s to more current works, including a portion of the installation from Kolten Flynn, the site-specific piece that Althoff and Lutz Braun created for the 4th Berlin Biennial.

A collaborative dance-theater piece, entitled I will be last was shown, in which the environment where the performance had taken place within the gallery remained in tact.  The props included an elongated, delicately constructed bicycle, of which the fragility of the material and absurdity of the form pushed it into the realm of fantasy.  A row of simple, cardboard lockers, pinned with pornographic photos, frame the setting in which a high school rape scene is dramatically enacted,  all within the context of contemporary dance.  Four individuals collaborate with Althoff in the performance.  The dynamism and energetic cohesion between the four is astounding.  As viewers, we are left with an 'after-the-factness' of an environment maintained as the performers left it, and are presented with a video recording of the performance on a small monitor placed on the floor. 
 
To speak of Althoff's work leads us in many directions.  Althoff transcends stylistic trademarks, which he has rendered inoperable within his practice.  Instead his work resides within several historical spaces simultaneously, recalling German Expressionism, Primitivism and Post- Impressionism.  There is a certain recoiling against parochial brutality, of the conflict that arises when the inner atmosphere of existentialism, with it’s dark fantasies and masochistic undertones meets that of the public, group or partnership, creating a convoluted atmosphere, where the mergence of reality and fantasy coexist. Unlike many contemporary artists operating within realm of research-based, geographically and historically informed practices, Althoff’s work slips into slightly mad, ephemeral, what could be called almost spiritual or esoteric realms; so personal a world, that the viewer is placed in the peripheral position of onlooker; unable to enter and unable to look away.