Holding 7
2019
Oil on canvas
51 3/16 x 31 1/2 inches (130 x 80 cm)
© Jutta Koether
An uncanny association binds the latter’s title, “Holding,” to the German word “Haltung,” which denotes both an attitude and a state of complete concentration. Koether’s curtains double as membranes: permeable skins that at once separate and join her to her cultural milieu, allowing influences to pass through and leave their marks. Such notions of transmission and absorption develop from the work of Katherine Mansfield, a modernist writer who was part of the London circle around Virginia Woolf. Mansfield’s vivid accounts of hue, shape, and sensation, both in her observations of everyday life and in her reflections on Impressionism and Paul Cézanne’s apples, deeply influenced Koether, contributing to the centrality of the color red and organic, rounded forms within her oeuvre.