HOUSEBOUND
There’s no photography allowed at Kai Althoff’s show at MoMA, which might be for the best. This sprawling multi-media installation, that fills a large gallery on the sixth floor, is something of a mess.
It obscures the artist’s signature works – lyrical, exotically-colored watercolors
and acrylics. Instead of highlighting these small panels, it drops them
within a distracting, disorderly stage-set.
The exhibition resembles a family home that’s been imploded, with the contents of its closets and attics spilling out. There are low white painted partitions, scuffed wood floor boards, and scrims hanging from the ceiling, that all outline a ghostly house with a peaked roof. Within it, household objects (appliances, cutlery, magazines, furniture, dolls, suitcases, clothes) are piled on platforms, packed inside vitrines, pooled on the floor, and pinned on the walls. Because these things are old and worn the place seems highly personal. It’s as if the artist is trying to capture a life – his own – by collecting all the things that passed through it. Althoff is my contemporary, and some of the objects brought back all-but-forgotten sense-memories from the mid-seventies: hand-thrown pottery in speckled glazes, dolls with stiff faces and thick synthetic hair, poorly composed black and white family photographs.
But Althoff’s paintings pack a much mightier punch. These small canvases, no larger than album covers, have a pungent, unpretty realism. They depict characters that seem to be based on real people, observed from up close, capturing particularities in face and figure that only a loved one would note. The scenes are rendered in secondary colors, in opaque fields and patterns, in claustrophobic, aspatial vignettes. Althoff’s brushwork is delicate, his palette feverish, his tone straightforward, and his effects quite moving. But here, at MoMA, rather than showing us his work, Althoff shows us his life. The world captured in his paintings – of the people around him – would have given much more.