Songs of New York — Jutta Koether

Jutta Koether’s move from Cologne to New York at the beginning of the 1990s marked a decisive transformation in her practice. Looking back, she described the relocation as a process of “self-displacement” — a conscious distancing from the encumbering Cologne art scene that allowed her to reposition herself. More than a rupture, this displacement became the starting point for a transatlantic practice intertwining earlier influences with new contexts.

While the previous exhibition with Jutta Koether at Galerie Buchholz New York focused on her paintings and her experimental writing for Cologne’s music magazine SPEX in the early 1980s, this exhibition begins with works from 1995. These include a large-format copy of a painting Koether acquired with Tom Verlaine at the Chelsea Flea Market, depicting massive colorful spotlights illuminating an otherwise dark Madison Square Garden, and a smaller work made for the exhibition Warmer Stern at Galerie Buchholz Cologne the following year.

Through the 2000s Koether’s painting expanded dramatically, embracing extremes of scale, surface and gesture: large-format canvases alongside intimate works; pitch-black canvases marked by delicate metallic lines alongside all-over compositions in vivid colors. A recurrent reference point was William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience; in 1996 Koether named her new SPEX column Songs of New York, tracing her transatlantic position in writing, and writing increasingly migrated into the paintings themselves.

Songs of New York is the second exhibition of Jutta Koether curated by Tonio Kröner and Christopher Müller, and the gallery’s eleventh solo exhibition with the artist since 1996.