12 december 2012

Kai Althoff

"Kai Althoff neither owns nor rents a studio. Not that his production doesn't merit one--galleries in Cologne, Berlin, and New York all show and sell his work. Althoff simply refuses an extra space, unwilling to divide the spheres of work and life. He prefers that his output, even when large in scale and technically complex, be conceived and, if possible, realized in the privacy and relative autonomy (that is, without the busy appurtenances common to most contemporary artists' places of work) of his carefully furnished two-room apartment in the center of Cologne.

This atelier abstinence may be unusual for a successful artist. But Althoff (born 1966), who avoided art school and instead created a persona based on a number of flamboyant, dandyish refusals and a range of multifaceted productions, doesn't fit today's bill of the artist as hyperprofessionalized international road warrior. He answers even less to the desires of a cultural moment whose main criterion of legitimation continues to be "the now." Alrhoff's dense and difficult work, which spans several registers (installation art to literary writing, painting to performance, music to pottery), eschews obvious signifiers of "contemporaneity." He systematically undoes the shackles of the present and retreats into pasts both fictional and actual, even biographical, inhabiting hybrid "cultural histories" of heretofore unimagined sincerity, euphoria, and cruelty." (bron: The Free Library, tekst: Tom Holert, uit een artikel uit Artforum International Magazine, 2002)

Geen opmerkingen:

Een reactie posten