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Lot 117: Fabio, Erwachsen Werden (Fabio, Growing Up)

Est: £200,000 GBP - £300,000 GBP
Christie'sLondon, United KingdomOctober 14, 2007

Item Overview

Description

Kai Althoff (b. 1966)
Fabio, Erwachsen Werden (Fabio, Growing Up)
each numbered '1' to '16' consecutively (on the reverse)
watercolour and graphite on paper, in sixteen parts
each: 11 5/8 x 16½in. (29.5 x 41.8cm.)
Executed in 1991

Artist or Maker

Exhibited

Cologne, Lukas & Hoffmann, Kai Althoff , 1992.
New York, White Columns, Stonewall , 1994.
London, Magnani, A Perilous Space , January-March 2003.
Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Kai KeinRespect (Kai NoRespect) , May-September 2004, no. 22 (details of sheets nos. 8, 9, 12, 13, 14 and 15 illustrated, p. 10). This exhibition later travelled to Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, September 2004-January 2005 .

Provenance

Galerie Lukas & Hoffmann, Cologne.
Private Collection, Italy.

Notes


Artist's Resale Right ("droit de Suite"). If the Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer also agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
"Archetypal and contemporary are contradictory terms, and yet each precisely describes Kai Althoff's art (...). Althoff melts each into his personal vat to create simple, mysterious tales of his own new vision without a particular chronology." (F. Bonami, 'Winterspelt' in Kai Kein Respect , exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004-05)

Since his first exhibitions in Cologne in the late 1980s, Kai Althoff has been widely recognized as one of the most unique and significant artists of his generation.
Combining superlative technical ease, with a complex understanding of the reasons and implications of our present, and with an unflinching attention for the moral marshes of liberal thought, Kai Althoff's art seeks to express the inexpressible in humans and in life.

The present lot of sixteen watercolours addresses a typically oblique correspondence between an exquisitely private narrative and an historical reckoning. Fabio's fairy tale of innocence, sexual awakening, self discovery and homosexual desire is played out in an imaginary, sun-drenched landscape where only glamour and beauty tread. Yet as always with Kai Althoff's art, the framing of the images - here presented as stills from a holiday movie - and the interplay between image surface and depth, suggest the artist's more complex relationship with his own nostalgic fantasy and with the heritage of 70's liberalism and sexual innocence.

This work is one of the most important in Althoff's oeuvre in the early 1990s and is unique both in scale and in scope.

Auction Details

Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale

by
Christie's
October 14, 2007, 12:00 PM EST

8 King Street, St. James's, London, LDN, SW1Y 6QT, UK