Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with artist Kai Althoff.  Living and working in Germany, Althoff creates imaginary environments in which paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects commingle. Borrowing from moments of history, religious iconography, and counter-cultural movements, the evocative context is propped upon narratives simultaneously arcane yet familiar, at once deeply personal yet universal. Often collaborating with fellow artists, Althoff will work with Nick Z, a Brooklyn-based graffiti artist, for this exhibition.

As curator Nicolas Baume wrote in his catalogue essay accompanying Althoff’s recent solo exhibition “Kai KeinRespekt (Kai NoRespect)” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston: “To ‘feel it all’ for Althoff, is to explore the manifold possibilities of human subjectivity and the complex range of emotions, responses, and beliefs that enable life to go on, even under great duress… Althoff’s literary imagination does more than describe its protagonists; it inhabits the characters he creates. Their visual rendering is a form of enactment through which their stories are allowed to unfold.”

Kai Althoff was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1966 where he continues to live and work. He has been included in numerous group shows, artistic collaborations, and solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States since the early 1990s. His work was exhibited in the group show  “Dear Painter, Paint Me” at the Kunsthalle Vienna in 2003 and traveled to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. His solo exhibition “Kai KeinRespekt (Kai NoRespect)” premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2004, before traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Most recently Althoff was included in the group exhibitions “Heart of Darkness” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and “Painting in Tongues” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the 2006 Berlin Biennial.