Impulse: Kai Althoff

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present “Impulse”, Kai Althoff´s second solo show in New York. The artist will be showing works on paper, painting-pictures and installations. Althoff´s works serve as a device suggesting self-reflection and introspection.

The artist will introduce the audience to his new body of work, which he just announces as “Bilder, Bilder, Bilder” (a German word which roughly translates into ‘images’). “Bilder” could be pictures of paintings, painting on photographs, photographs of altered drawings, painting on painting, and so on. Within this idea he desires to convey that same exact impulse which impelled him to create these pieces to us. It is an attempt to make available to the public the drive and motivation of a creative artistic process.

Althoff is a storyteller who often does not tell the whole story; he reveals only some moments of it, like stills from a film. The stories or stills act as a catalyst to get into his private worlds. Althoff sometimes deals with alter egos allowing his identity to blend with the collective consciousness. What appears at first glance as hermetic, unsettling and foreign, gives way to an intense and personal design of the artist’s aesthetic: a seemingly naive atmosphere replete with social and political commentary. Althoff´s ambient and slightly decorative surroundings are charged with narratives full of unyielding clues -- beautiful, eerie, and disarming; they tell a story that is not always obviously out of the ordinary.