“Ultimately, the relative inaccessibility of his work is less a consequence of his esoteric elitism than a kind of antimodern anachronism. His sources stem from the applied arts such as illustration, interior design, and advertising, favoring styles and techniques that have disappeared or been forgotten and are always more quirky than straightforward—the unlikely record sleeves he has invented for the Bee Gees and Eminem are prime examples. There are strains of nostalgia, too, in his magical world, which bring to mind the romanticization of rubble and vacant lots in “magic realist” West German postwar literature (by the likes of Hans Erich Nossack, Oskar Loerke, and Elisabeth Langgässer), as well as in Berlin’s underground music and art scenes after the fall of the wall.
E xecuted in 1990 and titled Ashley’s after a fictitious band, this set of twelve exceptional works on paper by German artist Kai Althoff are emblematic of the artist’s distinct visual vocabulary which succinctly reflect the counterculture movement of the 1990s. The original drawings for a set of prints, these works capture the artist’s dual role as artist and musician. The square format of each sheet with hand-drawn capital letters across the top with phrases such as “A Super Group” and “Thinking People” are evocative of record covers. The production of Ashley's marked the first and only time that Althoff has clearly linked his double role as an artist and a pop musician in a single work. Each image depicts happy scenes androgynous, bohemian world populated by people in ring-pattern pullovers, sitting on beds, wearing gigantic headphones or eating breakfast, seemngly quotidian scenes that Althoff imbues with a fascinating character.
As an individual he resists the label of ‘artist’, and yet as an artist, to borrow the words of the Museum of Modern Art’s director, Glenn D. Lowry, there is no one more “fearless and determined” (Glenn D. Lowry, ‘Foreword’, in: Ibid., p. 7). Championed by David Teiger early on his career, Kai Althoff is an artist whose work is remarkably complex in its baffling simplicity. As rewarding as it is confounding and as beautiful as it is unsettling, Althoff’s oeuvre presents us with a host of thrilling ambiguities left gloriously unexplained. His work is not so much a matter of pseudo-historically reconstructing a period of bohemian initiatives somewhere between hippiedom and pop, and it is even less a matter of revivalism or nostalgia, as it is of constructing an imaginary past. 'This is how it was' is replaced by 'this is how it will have been'. Future perfect, in which the promises of this era are held open again for later fulfillment.