Jutta Koether: 4 the Team

Lévy Gorvy, New York

Jutta Koether: 4 the Team

27.02.2020 - 18.04.2020 [Closed Temporarily]

New York—Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announceits debut exhibition of Jutta Koether. Spanning all three floors of the gallery’s landmark building at 909 Madison Avenue, the exhibition featuresnew paintings alongside a selection of key canvases from the early1980sto 1990. Departing from the question of what it means to paint, and to continue painting, in the present moment, Koether adopts a fluid authorial position. Mining the discourses of appropriation that shaped Cologne culture in the ’80s, as well as those that she encountered when she moved to New York in 1991, she makes them her own, constructing an eclectic artistic genealogy that runs from early-modern perspective painting through Symbolism, Post-Impressionism,and Surrealism. She layers these allusions with a recurring repertoire of motifs, including pixelated grids, vibrantred paint, and unfurling ribbons. The meaning of these tropes is insistent but elusive, at once historically layered and negotiated anew by each viewer who encounters Koether’s canvases. Engaging with both the medium’s past and its unfolding present, Koether foregrounds affect, asynchrony, and dissonance, clearing a new and distinctlycontemporary space for painting.

At Lévy Gorvy, three new large-scale paintingsgreet the visitor on the ground floor.Prismatic and complex, eachembracespendent meanings—and the anxietythat such semantic irresolution may provoke—while looking forward to unforeseen possibilities.
In Encore (2019), a female figure—a surrogate for the artist—commands a panoramic stage. Brushes in hand, she grasps a bowed ribbon which swirls exuberantly into space, connecting her body tothe theater’s lavish interior. Pointillist dots and miniature abstract paintingscompose her audience, whichshe confrontswitharms generously openas she reprises her performance. Engaging music as an allegory for painting, Encore aligns the two art forms, celebrating their ability to condense notions and feelings that exceed expression in words. Identical in size to Encore, though reversed in orientation, Neue Frauand Neuer Mann(both 2019) convey Koether’s vision of their titular “new woman” and “new man”:concepts with a rich legacy among avant-garde artists, who sought to uniteart andlife, revolutionizing both in the process. Set on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Neue Frau overlays a mural of trailblazing politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezwith a looping garland. Its pendant, Neuer Mann,depictstwo male bodies.One tumbles through space, entwined with a cascading ribbon, while another standswithhis left finger pointed upward; thisenigmatic gesture likewise appears in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, hinting at his conception of painting as a mode of thinking with one’s hands, wherein the artist inhabits the picture, fusing mind, body, and image. Set within a field of kaleidoscopic color, the upright figure here cradles a palm tree: apossibleallusion to Christbut also a symbol of renewal, like the delicate yet resilient plant that sprouts from concrete before Ocasio-Cortez’s likeness in Neue Frau.

The exhibition’s second floor attends to Koether’s early years in Cologne, introducing concepts andstructures that threadthrough her oeuvre. Intimately sized, like ritual objects or fetishes, these paintings bear witness to the artist’s searchfor alternatives to bothstandard narratives of modernism and then-dominant modelsof Neo-Expressionism.Seeking other waysto be, and to be as an artist, Koether looked to esoteric and dissident traditions, “sipping” them, astwo paintingsin the exhibition, Some Esoteric Sipping (1986), propose.Defined byirregular squares from whichfibrous cords alternately dangle and sprout,each movesbetween abstraction and figuration, transformingthe canvas into a bodily terrain. Earlier canvases, such as Edie(1983) and Untitled(1984), emphasize the materiality of paint, here presented as a metaphor for flesh—with their dense impasto, skin-toned palette, and fragmented female bodies. Deliberately crude, they effect a sense ofspatial compression that relentsin the mid-to-late 1980s throughlighter, more liquidapplications of paint. Rendered in a range of intensereds, 100% (Portrait of Robert Johnson) (1990) pairs a schematic face with a litany of nouns and descriptors, including“obsessed,” “electric,” “spiritual,” “astral,” and “aura.” Incongruous and charged, the diptych illuminatesKoether’ssingular approach topainting,a medium that she pursues with “100%” commitment,unfazed bypostmodernproclamations of its demise.

Vorhang(1988–89) introduces the red curtain motif that reappears in the cape and coiffureof the protagonist ofEncore, as well as in the quiveringlinesand fissuresof the Holdingseries (2019), also on view in the exhibition. An uncanny association binds the latter’s title, “Holding,” tothe German word “Haltung,” which denotes both an attitude and a state of completeconcentration. Koether’s curtainsdouble asmembranes: permeable skinsthat at once separate and joinherto hercultural milieu,allowing influences to pass through and leave their marks. Such notions of transmissionand absorptiondevelop fromthe work of Katherine Mansfield, a modernistwriter who was part of the London circle around Virginia Woolf. Mansfield’s vivid accounts of hue,shape, and sensation, both in her observationsof everyday lifeand in her reflectionson Impressionism and PaulCézanne’sapples, deeply influenced Koether, contributing to the centrality ofthe color red and organic,rounded forms within heroeuvre.

On the exhibition’sthe third floor, a suite of new paintingselaborates upon Koether’s unique mode ofappropriation. The artist’s approach, which she describes as “affective import” is a process of both introduction—the movement of objects andideas from one context to another—and signification, the suggestion ofa meaning sensed not explicitly stated.Questioning the ways in which painting’s past is accessed and mediated, Koether honors the psychological pull of hersources, positing making as a reciprocal endeavor wherein the artist does not master the source but allows it to repercuss and ramify. InPink Ladies2and Pink Ladies 3(both 2019), curvedgeometries suggestive ofapples and breastsaccumulate, recalling Mansfield’s query, posed in a1917letter to a painterfriend: “Whenyoupaintapplesdoyoufeelthatyourbreastsandyourkneesbecomeapples,too?”Ubiquitous withinthe genres of still life and nude, these shapes fuse art and body, summoningbiomorphic abstractionin the post-minimalist sensein their obsessive iteration.

A trio ofcanvases, each organized by the number four,build upon the tradition of multi-figure allegorical painting, as seen in examples as wide-ranging as Italian Renaissance master Jacopo da Pontormo’s Visitation (1528–29), Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon(1907), and Henri Matisse’s Dance(1910). Lespugued Leigh (4 Lucian) (2019)finds pleasure in dissonance,layeringa likeness ofLucian Freud’s visceral depiction of performance artist Leigh Bowery in Naked Man, Back View(1991) with the bulbous silhouette of the paleolithic fertility idolVenus of Lespugue(c. 26,000 BCE). Dürered (4 Women)(2019) groundsitself inAlbrecht Dürer’s engraving, Four Naked Women(1497),a work of art whose meaning remains undecided, endlessly intriguing but frustrating scholars who seek a straightforward exegesis. Koether reimagines the scene as a concentration of conflicting feminine energies, whichsheinterrupts with several of her signal motifs, including ambiguous apples-cum-breasts and clichéd emoji-like formsthat she calls “demonic options,” whichhere occupy the vantage of the small horned devil in Dürer’s original. Thesebubbleheads Croisset,1985. Oil on canvas, 14 x 14 inches (35.5 x 35.5 cm). © Jutta Koether. Courtesy Lévy Gorvy and Galerie Buchholz unsettle the scene with theirmischievousstrangeness, by turns undermining itsseriousness and promptingunexpected details to emerge.

Lending the exhibition its subtitle, Koethered (4 the Team)(2019) couples a line from a 1986 speech by Joseph Beuys—"dieFackel der offenenGesellschaft trägt sich nicht von selbst” (“The torch of open society does not carry itself”)—withthe motto “4 the team,” which Koether clipped from a Mercedes-Benz advertisement celebrating the collaboration that contributes to aFormula One victory. Inscribed atop an array ofsinuous, slippinglines and clusters,thesedisparate texts cut to the core of Koether’s practice, which conceives painting as a social medium: the product of a collective consciousness, at once esotericand everyday.Koethered (4 the Team)thusspeaks to essential values that enable artmaking, here conceived a complexdynamicof continuity and change, its survival contingent onits ability to becarried forth by new actors.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Lévy Gorvy will publish a limited-edition artist’s book with texts by the artist and noted art advisor Allan Schwartzman. Miming the format of an auction catalogue, the book centers on Demonic Options (large format #1)(2010): an assemblage paintingheld in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art,New York, which features many of the visual tropes and conceptual strategiesthat animate Koether’s oeuvre. Together, the twooffer a provisional key to Koether’s practice, which extendsfrom Cologne to New York, from the 1980s to our day and beyond.

About the Artist
Born in Cologne in 1958, Koether lives and works in Berlin and New York. She has staged performances and exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial (2012). Solo exhibitions of her work include Tour De Madame, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2018; traveled to Mudam Luxembourg, 2019); Libertine, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (2019–20); Cycle 1: Viktoria, Luise, and Isabelle, PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin(2013–14); The Thirst, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2009); LEIBHAFTIGE, MALEREI, JXXXA, Bergen Kunsthalle (2008); Änderungen aller Art, Kunsthalle Bern (2007); Love in a Void,Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (2006);Fantasia Colonia, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2006); and massen, malerei und versammlung, Generali Foundation, Vienna (1991).Koether’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Bern; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.

About Lévy Gorvy
Lévy Gorvy cultivates a program devoted to innovation and connoisseurship in the fields of modern, postwar, and contemporary art. Founded by Dominique Lévy and Brett Gorvy, Lévy Gorvy maintains gallery spaces at 909 Madison Avenue in New York, in Mayfair, London, and in Central, Hong Kong. The gallery fosters continued dedication to the living artists and artists’ estates that it represents and offers a robust program of exhibitions and multidisciplinary events. The gallery also produces ongoing art historical research and original scholarship, publishing exhibition catalogues,monographs, and other key publications. The Zürich office, Lévy Gorvy with Rumbler, offers bespoke private advisory services to collectors and institutions around the globe.