Lévy Gorvy to Represent Jutta Koether in the U.S.

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce the gallery’s representation of German artist Jutta Koether in the United States. Since the early 1980s, Koether has forged a painting practice that reckons with the medium’s histories, contradictions, and pleasures. Departing from the question of what it means to paint, and to continue painting, in the present moment, Koether adopts a destabilized authorial position, welcoming collaborations with peers and involving viewers as active participants in the construction of her work’s meaning. The twinned processes of making and reception, she posits, are never complete but rather contingent—continuously negotiated as a work moves across different places and times. 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, Koether made them her own, clearing a space for painting that embraced affect, asynchrony, and dissonance. Using and reusing a range of motifs and materials—such as grids, X-marks, and red paint—she cultivates the medium’s essential strangeness: its ability, despite its myriad determinations, to yield something unanticipated and vital.

The slow, rigorous thoughtfulness inherent to Koether’s work has manifested in diverse forms, including installation, sculpture, performance, and writing, yet has always led both out from and back into painting.  After studying art and philosophy at the University of Cologne, she took root in the city, experimenting with various mediums and exhibiting in Germany and Austria. Her 1991 solo exhibition, 100% Malerei, in Cologne marked her continued commitment to painting, which she deepened upon her arrival in New York that same year. Staged in her Manhattan studio, The Inside Job, 1992, consisted of a large-scale painting in progress, which she invited visitors to view and discuss. Unstretched and laid atop the floor, the canvas transformed into an ongoing event, as Koether incorporated her guests’ responses and bodily impressions into the work. Her first solo exhibition in New York, Affective Import, was held at Pat Hearn Gallery the following year. Its title conveyed her unique approach to appropriation, which honors the psychological pull of its source, positing making as a reciprocal endeavor wherein the artist does not master the source but allows it to repercuss and ramify. The litany of nouns and descriptors—“obsessed,” “painted,” “electric,” “spiritual,” “paranoia,” “hypostatic,” “skies,” “astral,” “aura,” “machine,” among others—that traverse her 1990 diptych, 100% (Portrait of Robert Johnson), offer another provisional key to her practice. Taking the enigmatic blues musician as its namesake, the painting renders these words in vivid, visceral reds, creating a suggestive, exuberant, and incongruous image.

Constructing an eclectic artistic genealogy, Koether explores a wealth of models, from early-modern perspective painting to Symbolism, Post-Impressionism, and Surrealism. Courting unanticipated symmetries and frictions, she displays her work in novel ways, including during lectures, suspended in midair, and held in hand. In 2018, her first retrospective opened at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich. Capturing the breadth of her oeuvre, it featured the cycle of paintings from which it took its title, Tour de Madame, 2018: twelve sweeping allegorical scenes, installed on glass architectural panels, that speak to her sustained engagement with the medium’s past and unfolding possibilities. The exhibition traveled to Mudam Luxembourg, where it is currently on view through May 12. In October, her exhibition Tour de Madame / Libertine will open at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany.

Lévy Gorvy’s first exhibition with the artist will be held in the fall of 2020. At the gallery’s landmark building at 909 Madison Avenue, Koether will present new paintings as well as a selection of works surveying her career. Coincident with this exhibition, the gallery will publish an editioned artist’s book, which will shed further light onto some of the quintessential aspects of and questions guiding Koether’s practice forward.

At Art Basel in June, Lévy Gorvy is proud to present, as a highlight of the gallery’s booth, one of the key paintings in Koether’s oeuvre, 100% (Portrait of Robert Johnson), following the painting’s exhibition in Luxembourg.

Dominique Lévy has commented: “We are inspired by Jutta Koether’s unique approach to painting. She is a rare artist who has her roots in a deep European tradition and yet profoundly belongs to a very meaningful group of American artists. Rigorously conceptual and contemplative in her language, she comes out of the modernist tradition of 20^th century painting. Her constant renegotiation of the dynamics of abstraction and figuration as well as that of the self and the other, connects her to the work of many artists the gallery is committed to. We are excited to demonstrate this link in Basel and confirm her belonging to this fascinating lineage.”

As Koether wrote of this new collaboration:

Renewal is inseparable from radical change:
The cycle “Tour de Madame”
painted as an ending/beginning (at 60) turned into
Libertine longing leading me to LG.
A place to release transformative energy and do it 100%
(just as Robert Johnson’s exalted logic and montaged mind has it manifested).
With that we will get started.

Like a Formula One race car pilot I’m stretching out across borders

while touching the ground in intensified/absurd ways.
Images will be studied, tested, driven, to the limits.
Rich, disturbing, strange blasts of images might occur on those
Libertine Grounds.