JUTTA KOETHER. SERINETTES. LADIES PLEASURES VARYING.

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Jutta Koether's sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Serinettes. Ladies Pleasures Varying.

Following her atmospheric installation in Paris as part of the gallery's series of exhibitions “A Moveable Feast” in 2014, the artist takes the gallery's spaces as a platform to investigate painting as performative structure whose position is continuously being negotiated.

Within the frame of her appropriations and distortions of male masters, Koether takes Jean-Siméon Chardin's La Serinette from 1753 as a point of departure to think about painting as an organic apparatus that embodies varying senses. Chardin's work depicts a young woman that interrupts her needle work to initiate her bird into signing by playing the serinette, a bird organ that produces a wide array of airy sounds. Koether's installation in two different series of rows reinstates Chardin's genre scene to form a space chord, a continual, stretched-out sound that gathers the vastness of a space.

The first group of seven paintings that form part of the installation, titled pique-niques (1), continue Koether's investigation on painting as an actual body in which the crusty, crass, glittery and crude present themselves all at once and form an independent materiality. By introducing a variation of round forms and active inscriptions richly coloured in red, pink and gold, the heart-shaped canvases playfully address gender assumed beliefs.

In addition, Koether presents pique-niques (2), a series of seven black paintings that follow the embedding of sense and existence into the material of paint matter itself. In the same way as in her red paintings, black is a colour Koether has returned to repeatedly since the 1980's. These paintings effectively transform a limited palette into a rich, liquid darkness that plays with the discursive weight of Rembrandt's strong tonal contrasts or Giacometti's sculptural stick figures, continuing Koether's exercise of reinstalling painting through painting.

Jutta Koether (1958) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Koether has an upcoming survey exhibition at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2018) that will travel to the Serralves Museum, Portugal. Her work forms part of the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunsthalle Bern. Koether has had solo exhibitions at DCA – Dundee Contemporary Arts (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2008); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2007) and Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2006). Her work was included in the 2014 Shanghai Biennial; in the Whitney Biennials in 2012 and 2006 and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Biennial.