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For his first show with the gallery, German artist Kai Althoff created an enigmatic, multilayered vision of private narratives in an intensely arranged installation of the kind he’d become best known for.

The first work one encounters is the nine-part drawing “Untitled”, 2012-2014. Rendered in sand colors with jolts of crimson in highlighted details and a dashing area in shades of blue, the drawing is broken up into triangles that frame different scenes. A Hasidic woman on the right corner is holding tools that could be knitting needles or drawing pencils. Next to her, a figure of a child with strange features is wearing a red helmet and a blue cape, perhaps an allusion to the biblical story of Joseph’s “coat of many colors”.

The bottom part of the scene shows a group of Hasidic men, some are looking up at the child while others look away. In a triangle on the left, a young Hasidic man is holding a tool used for textile production in one hand, and the edge of the child’s cape in the other. Another man, whose head and arms are red, is collapsing. Althoff, who hails from Cologne, has been living in New York City for some time, and the private worlds and shards of everyday scenes that inhabit his work seem to have shifted with new experiences. Althoff resides in an area populated by Hasidic Jews. The traditional, closed community lives a in certain degree of detachment from present time and speak Yiddish, a so-called “dead language”, which Althoff is perhaps able to partially understand. Relations to religious devotion and the blurring of temporality are two central motifs in his art, and the figure of Hasidic Jews seems to embody both.

Entering the next room, a cryptic if luscious scene fills the space. Many meters of crushed velvet in champagne tones drape from the walls and onto the floor. The light is soft and yellow. Scattered around the space are wooden tailor mannequins dressed in black or white blouses and dresses in a style that can only be described as old-fashioned. A mannequin is placed horizontally on the floor, one of its arms stretched up towards a painting that depicts swine, though that’s hardly discernible in the painting’s monochromatic, striped composition. Knitted wool jumpers, all untitled and all unique, rest on chairs or on a table at the end of the room. There are plastic sticks strewn around; some look like thin watercolor brushes, some like knitting needles. Several paintings around the space (all untitled) have very irregular shapes. They’re rendered in dark tones, and though extremely intriguing, the narratives they depict are impassable – probably because they’re not narratives at all, but rather fragments of scenes and the memories thereof. Nevertheless, Althoff’s meticulous staging of the installation is a hard to resist invitation to try your best shot at hermeneutics.

There are some links created between a closed, Hasidic community, the textile industry that was historically in Jewish hands, and childhood on a farm – perhaps in Germany – that could point towards a certain reading. But then again, as the artist put it in the show’s appropriately arcane self-authored press release, speaking about the “content and comfort and ultimate value of [the] work,” he concludes that “if successful, [it] results in a void that defies words and emotions to be expressed without causing nausea.” However, the show inspires sentiments very different from offense. Althoff continues stating that both spirituality and adornment “are to discover their natural unification” in the attempt to “make life bearable”. If beauty and otherworldliness were the goal, there’s no denying their attainment.

If you want to see some images check this and this and this

Michael Werner, London
22.9 – 15.11.2014