Kai Althoff and the Whitney Biennial

The list of artists for the 2012 Biennial is now officially out.  One of them is the German painter Kai Althoff, based in Cologne, whose work remains a puzzle to me but one that I am content to chew on.  His work is difficult to categorize because it’s partly abstract and partly figurative, part sculpture and part painting.  Images from his 2011 show at the Gladstone Gallery below:

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From the press release for the Gladstone Gallery show:

“The images herein depict mundane and fantastic situations enacted by human and animal souls, figures ill and ecstatic about the situations they have been granted. Some figures cannot help but stare or grab at each other, while others step on their companions, soiling any hope of communion. Their wills, like twisted wicks, burn distinct but unified fires. They are composed of several species but they cannot
tell themselves apart, awakening loathsome blood in the veins of each body. With sycophantic excitement they conduct every modern day sacrament—murder, construction, commerce, and hygiene (among others). Yet their tangled wills act not in the name of altruism or holiness, but from their everlasting yearning for life’s sweet spots and the age-old wish to dissociate from (or marry) all carnal cravings. These acts set the figures at odds with their surroundings, as flowers ill through winter’s scour.”