「rEceNt WoRkS」Jutta Koether 個展Empty Gallery
Empty Gallery is pleased to present rEceNt WoRKS, Jutta Koether's first solo exhibition in Greater Asia.
For decades, Koether has pursued a practice which merges writing, painting, and performance in order to engage a reified art history on her own singular expressive terms. In her paintings, which also constitute a form of criticism, novel gestures emerge from a space of deep immersion into the aesthetic worlds and socio-cultural matrices attendant to particular artists. Creating through a movement of perpetual transmutation, she repurposes fragmentary elements drawn from canonical figures in order to generate a personal iconography which never seeks closure, but is instead defined by polyvocal openness and sense of parataxis. These charged borrowings and energetic re-makings-often conducted from a female point of view—reveal the mechanics of artistic performativity and self-commodification, as well as the submerged hierarchies of value implicit in our relationship to Art History. However, despite its critical valence, Koether's method manages a rare and crucial feat. Through the sheer depth of its existential commitment, it exceeds the nihilistic self-absorption and facile end-game posturing characteristic of much "critical painting", instead taking aim at the unresolved antinomy between sincerity and irony, romantic disclosure and critical distance.
In rEceNt WoRkS, Koether has created a suite of interconnected paintings which respond to the provocation of Empty Gallery's unique spatial model. These new paintings primarily adopt the form of the triptych, conceptualizing each narrow panel as a physically separate but thematically interdependent monad. Within these shimmering fields of self-reference, we recognize a sprinkling of iconic forms-orbs and garlands, slashes and ribbons, fleshy flowers and gem-like portals. Past motifs and mannerisms jostle one another, creating new forms from the old-an unruly chorus of Koether-isms. Alternatingly dense and diaphanous, they contain unstable allusions to figures as varied as Alberto Giacometti, Emily Bronte, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, and countless others.