Parkett : The Parkett series with contemporary artists. (Zürich : Parkett-Verlag, 2005)
﻿Kai Althoff, Glenn Brown, and Dana Schutz invite us with deliberate guile to enter into highly idiosyncratic personal worlds and wide-ranging universes of their own creation. They put their faith in the power of the image—though, as Oliver Koerner von Gustorf observes, there is talk at times of a framework that is not interdisciplinary, but rather antidisciplinary. Glenn Brown and Dana Schutz apply themselves to the “master discipline” of oil painting with bravura but only as a platform for corrosive flights of fancy that transport it into another dimension. Glenn Brown burrows into “the genre of painting” in order to embark on what might be called a subcutaneous journey into his Musée Imaginaire. His steady companion is a great delight in deception of all kinds: travesties of eras past and present, trompe l’oeil in the perfectly flat rendition of pastose brushstrokes, or the gradual liquefaction of false trails. The neo-rococo excrescence on the cover is the quintessential embodiment of all heads that have ever taken up residence on a cover or a canvas, and which now dissolves before our very eyes into a froth of saturated colors. The implications of a treatment of time that borrows from the workings of fairy tales and casually unites centuries, decades, and generations is fleshed out in Veit Loers essay on the work of Kai Althoff. All three collaboration artists share an aspect aptly described in Jan Avgikos’ analysis of the work of Dana Schutz. Her painting is, as she puts it, an “almost encyclopedic archive of nightmarish and sensational imagery” that nonetheless shows a “life-enhancing optimism” in its “fictional post-apocalyptic setting”. While Schutz’s images graphically lay bare existential extremes in the life situations of society’s castaways, Kai Althoff accosts us with other extremes, backdrops of gloom, such as the diabolical. (editorial by publisher)
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Keywords: Althoff, Kai; Schutz, Dana; Brown, Glenn