Jutta Koether

The title eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe already forms a sort of “mad garland” – Koether’s term for unspooled compositional moves by which painting makes its own space, for example via the ongoing-ness of formal motifs or painterly inscriptions that extend color along quick lateral trajectories within a given composition. In her new work, the artist channels the impatient graffiti-like scrawl of Cy Twombly, with legible writing sometimes detouring into abstract ciphers, or lines of pure painterly notation. “Unhinged grapes” are what Koether calls the bursts and clusters of atom-like orbs, bubbles, fruits and faces, here mobilized across multiple canvases. These are motif-actions that continually de-compose and recompose painting in the room and within each work. The artist improvises such terms in order to designate a moment of breakdown or a loss of distinction between form and action, between images and the energies that transport them. Mad garlands, unhinged grapes and painting-writing articulate chaos and change in concrete, painterly terms... naming the artist’s desire to participate in this moment, to paint from here. Painting, then, becomes another word for training the muscles of the soul, extreme reflection, spirit-drive or dramatic mediation.

The larger canvases in this exhibition are based on imagery taken from lifestyle advertisements seen in the Financial Times, selling luxury assets such as yachts (The World, 2022), private jets (Fly Now, 2022) and the launch of a new high-speed train in Europe (ICE Neo 3, 2022). Such images are re-activated in flourishing garden-like compositions, where Koether’s amplified vernal palette combines with glittery metallic pigments. In these works, “garden” does not represent Paradise so much as the opening-up of a strange, semi-wild place to articulate and curate all kinds of growth and mutation. The garden is a zone of work where pasts and futures connect and combine in sudden, unforeseen ways. Going always further down the path of painting, but never in a straight or pre-programmed line: the garden is an explosion within its bounds. Dream until it’s your Reality, 2022, meanwhile, revisits a late self-portrait by Rembrandt (in New York’s Frick collection, currently re-installed at the Breuer building), a costume-conscious pose within a moment of meltdown and financial ruin.

A sequence of four “flowers” recall Koether’s 1980s chapter in Cologne, where her practice emerged in counteraction to the criticisms of that moment’s established male players. Tout Court I-IV mobilize an O’Keefean shape as tough kitsch, signaling the artist’s ongoing interest in painting that resists accepted models. At the center of each flower is a box-like pupil, an angular grain or chip that cuts within the roundness of the form, propelling another, harsher noise into view. Like her Unhinged Grapes and cursive foliage, Koether’s flowers deploy repetition, setting up sites of continual composition and de-composition. These works suggest both vulnerability and endurance, the soft power of regeneration and perhaps a new hard currency, too.

Koether’s singular moves, which often come named by the artist, are means of multiplying connections and relations within her practice. The garland is a mad connector, a painting-tentacle extending beyond the studio to include other practices as well: the desire to open up painting to the world. Here, Koether addresses unhinged-ness as a condition of our time – the emotionally, mentally and literally unhinged people of New York and everywhere.

Jutta Koether lives and works in New York and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include How goes it? at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 2021; 4 The Team at Lévy Gorvy, New York, 2020; Tour de Madame at Mudam, Luxembourg, 2019; Bortolami, New York, 2018 and Tour de Madame at Museum Brandhorst, Munich, 2018.