Kai Althoff

It might seem to take a Herculean effort to fight the antiseptic power of the white cube, to inject its pristine surfaces with human warmth, but Kai Althoff approaches the task with such punkish insouciance that he almost fools you into believing it’s easy. And for him, it is: He just slaps some sunny-sickly yellow paint on the floor (not too carefully, now), drops the towering ceilings to a more personable height, adds some shimmering, Lynchian red curtains for ambiance, and then fills the resulting space with an exuberant grab bag of his recent paintings and sculptures, all of which are brimming over with a surfeit of expressive energy. Add to the idiosyncratic mise-en-scène the fact that the show is also designed to be in a state of flux, with Althoff periodically swapping out works for others squirreled away in a curtained-off makeshift atelier hidden in the back of the gallery, and you have something resembling real vitality.

Of course, the show’s merits don’t rest solely on Althoff’s exhibition strategy. The works on view strike an adroit balance between fastidious, expert technical skill and calculated carelessness, and also manage to be stylistically allusive (several pieces call to mind both a litany of German and Austrian greats—Grosz, Dix, Schiele, Kirchner, Beckmann—and, during Althoff’s occasional forays into sentimentality, the work of Chagall) without seeming either derivative or anachronistic. Even works that could easily have stumbled into the realm of the cloying or the ham-fisted—and this is where we meet Chagall—somehow feel right in the world that Althoff has constructed. One leaves the show with the welcome feeling that this is an artist who has creativity to burn.