Kai Althoff
Kai Kein Respekt
26 May - 06 September 2004
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
955 Boylston Street, Boston
617-266-5152
www.icaboston.org
Kai Althoff, Untitled, 1998, Collection of Alexander Schroder
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opens first major survey exhibition of the work of Kai Althoff
Cologne-based artist Kai Althoff has recently emerged as one of the most compelling figures in contemporary art. A major survey exhibition of the artist’s work opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will explore how Althoff uses a variety of styles and materials-from watercolor to boat lacquer-to invent imaginative worlds that combine history, folklore, fantasy, and contemporary culture. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition will introduce audiences to the full range of Althoff’s art, including works on paper, photographs, paintings, installations, texts, videos, and music.
Althoff is best known in the United States for his extraordinarily delicate and evocative watercolors, his finely wrought pencil drawings, and his highly inventive collages, paintings and resin reliefs. For the ICA, Althoff has conceived the exhibition as being a work of art itself, for which he will create a series of environments bringing together his body of work from the last 15 years in new ways. Each environment will tell its own rich narrative or story, with the work filling the walls from floor to ceiling.
Althoff draws on a multitude of sources in his art, from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture and from medieval and gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism. Althoff’s work, which is populated by a multitude of characters, often suggests narratives that have multiple layers and meanings. In the installation Ein noch zu weiches Geweese der Urian-Bundner (A Still Too Soft Bearing on the Part of the Urian Brotherhood) (1999), reminiscent of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, Althoff creates a fictional society of evil men. Their life of evil and violence is portrayed through a series of paintings, photographs, and sculptures. Through a series of watercolors rendered in bright reds, oranges, and greens, and entitled Erwachsen warden, Fabio (Grow Up, Fabio) (1972), Althoff invents a story that is set in Italy about an adolescent boy accepting his homosexuality. In the painting Untitled (Ill boy in bed) (2001), the narrative is more ambiguous. A child lies in bed while a large foreboding man leans over him reaching toward the figure, making it unclear whether the man’s intentions are helpful or hurtful.
Althoff, who also founded the band Workshop, was born in 1966 in Cologne, Germany, where he currently lives and works. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries in Berlin, Cologne, London, New York, Vienna, and Hamburg. Althoff has also been featured in numerous international group exhibitions including the 1993 and 2003 Venice Biennales, Chere Paintre, Leibe Maler, Dear Painter at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2002), and Drawing Now-8 Propositions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002).
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed in collaboration with the artist and includes essays by leading German cultural critics Diedrich Diederichsen and Olaf Karnik, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago curator Francesco Bonami, and exhibition curator Nicholas Baume.
After closing at the ICA, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from September 23, 2004, to January 16, 2005.
Major funding for Kai Kein Respekt has been provided by David Teiger and Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. Additional support has been provided by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
