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Artist: Jutta Koether
Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Jutta Koether: tRaVeLiNgliGHt, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s 1932 Beaux Arts-style townhouse at 19 East 64th Street, New York. Through twelve new canvases, Koether reveals the most recent phase of her Grid paintings, created in direct dialogue with Alberto Giacometti’s Still Life with an Apple (1937)—an important work in his radical investigations of perception—held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Reflecting on her new series, Koether cites Giacometti’s quote, “I am only making by unmaking.”
Koether’s practice is defined by her decades-long engagement with the histories of painting. The works in the present series are titled Let ‘em roll, a phrase differentiated across the canvases with the artist’s unconventional capitalizations. In these paintings, Giacometti’s composition is deconstructed and transformed by Koether’s gridded structures—which in themselves relate to the lineage of geometric abstraction, including the work of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Koether began her Grid paintings in the mid-2000s to explore her relationship to figuration and modernism, considering Mondrian as well as the abstraction of Agnes Martin, among others. Here, notably, the size of the underlying grid changes throughout the twelve canvases. Other “disturbances,” in the artist’s words, appear in her gestural paint application and use of iridescent, neon, and metallic colors—stimulating different perceptual effects. This, in concert with the varied interpretations of Giacometti’s source canvas, incite questions around the act of looking and, above all, create an invitation to further study.
Speaking of the apple, Koether notes that it “rolls through all of my work”—often used to indicate the ambiguity inherent to figuration by becoming a “red sphere or even a breast.” Throughout her career, Koether has used what she refers to as “motifs that have made their own journeys.” For instance, Giacometti’s depiction of an apple drew on the flattened and expressive still lifes of Paul Cézanne—the post-Impressionist who constitutes another important influence on Koether. Her palette in the Let ‘em roll series is particularly suggestive of Cézanne’s rich reds and blues—underscoring the recent influx of blues in her Grid paintings, previously dominated by red hues.
Enchanted with Cézanne’s red apples tumbling over blue fabrics, early twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “This rolling of red into blue is an action that seems to arise...” Koether’s phrase “Let ‘em roll” is a gesture that further points to her relationship with music and the histories of punk rock and the post-punk scene in Germany and New York. In tRaVeLiNgliGHt, Koether establishes inquisitiveness at the core of her practice, merging explorations of art-historical motifs and recognition, intervention and disruption. “What are we relating to when we say modernism?” she asks, encouraging the viewer to occupy a space in relation to painting that situates the medium and the act in the present moment.
About the Artist
Jutta Koether’s paintings challenge the viewer’s understanding of the medium’s terms and histories, often appropriating and retooling elements from the work of male masters. Engaging a range of motifs and materials—such as grids, X-marks, and red paint—she cultivates painting’s ability to yield something unanticipated, vital, and feminine. Born in Cologne in 1958, Jutta Koether studied art and philosophy at the University of Cologne and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She is the author of several books, including f. (1987), which was translated into English and republished by Sternberg Press in 2015. In 2018, the first in-depth survey dedicated to Koether’s work was organized by the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand- Duc Jean. From 2022 to 2023, Koether presented the exhibition Black Place at Artium Museoa, Vitoria- Gasteiz, Spain. Solo exhibitions dedicated to her work have also been shown at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, among other venues. Her work resides in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Bern; mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Museum Brandhorst.
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