Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Perhaps we take it for granted that visual artists - unlike eternally adolescent rock rebels - deal in a considered, adult way with the perceptual reservoirs of childhood, but Kai Althoff breathes unexpected life into this territory. Far from conforming to the usual folksy idea of the artist, like a child with its toys, bringing life to dead objects through unfocused images of amazed innocence, Althoff reclaims a lived social history through the dream-like, emotional richness of distant memory.
Althoff is sitting on a mattress. His pale torso is bare and painted with coloured horizontal stripes like a pullover. He is smoking, and brushes his hair off his face from time to time, staring into space in a detached sort of way. Visitors to the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne on this winter's evening in chat amongst themselves or, slightly disturbed, look at the scene on the floor.
Beside the mattress is an old stereo system - the kind teenagers have in their bedrooms - playing a record by the fictitious band Ashley's.
The gate-fold sleeve of the LP, comprising colour reproductions of twelve felt-pen drawings, stretches accordion-like across the space. The images depict happy scenes of an androgynous, bohemian world populated by people in ring-pattern pullovers, sitting on beds, wearing gigantic headphones or eating breakfast. Each picture bears hand-drawn capital letters saying things like 'Thinking People', 'Supergroup', or 'A Coming-Out', which all turn out to be song titles.
