There’s something deeply weird about Kai Althoff’s art – deliberately so. The German’s work is all about mixing different categories together so that his canvases, which often come in strange, irregular shapes, are a crazy stew of different painting and drawing styles. You can have a lot of fun, to be sure, spotting references: from the savage or etiolated caricatures that stem from German Expressionism, to more naive-looking sections that quote forms of folk art. Yet none of this quite captures the paintings’ sense of fragmented narrative – the sheer, incongruous bizarreness conjured up by delicately drawn images of leering, fuchsia-skinned Orthodox Jews, for example.
The content of his paintings, though, is only the half of it. While Althoff’s canvases are hung round the gallery walls, the central space is filled by a kind of theatrical scene, featuring long drapes of muslin, dressmakers’ models wearing nineteenth-century clothes, and various artistic tools scattered about. In other words, the whole thing’s really a type of installation, an immersive environment of which the paintings form only a part, like props. And you also notice, strewn about, several ornate and beautiful, if oddly-shaped, sweaters. Knitted by Althoff himself, they’re listed as works in their own right – so that’s another boundary, between art and craft, being blurred.
As to what the whole thing actually means, that’s an open question. The set-up is presumably supposed to evoke an artist’s (or clothier’s) studio, yet it’s never really convincing enough to make you forget you’re in an expensive commercial gallery. Perhaps it’s all meant as a satire on creativity, on the commodified cult of the artist-genius. But as you wander about, with a record of mad, Germanic music (composed and performed by Althoff) playing in the background, the barrage of ideas and influences gradually ends up feeling just that bit too whimsical – distracting for distraction’s sake.
Gabriel Coxhead