Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to announce Jutta Koether: tRaVeLiNgliGHt, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s 1932 Beaux Arts-style townhouse at 19 East 64th Street, New York. Through twelve new canvases, Koether reveals the most recent phase of her Grid paintings, created in direct dialogue with Alberto Giacometti’s Still Life with an Apple (1937)—an important work in his radical investigations of perception held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Reflecting on her new series, Koether cites Giacometti’s quote, “I am only making by unmaking.”
Koether’s practice is defined by her decades-long engagement with the histories of painting. The paintings in the present series are titled Let ‘em roll, a phrase differentiated across the canvases with the artist’s unconventional capitalizations. In these works, Giacometti’s composition is deconstructed and transformed by Koether’s gridded structures—which in themselves relate to the lineage of geometric abstraction, including the work of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. Koether began her Grid paintings in the mid-2000s to explore her relationship to figuration and modernism, considering Mondrian as well as the abstraction of Agnes Martin, among others. Here, notably, the size of the underlying grid changes throughout the twelve canvases. Other “disturbances,” in the artist’s words, appear in her gestural paint application and use of iridescent, neon, and metallic colors—stimulating different perceptual effects. This, in concert with the varied interpretations of Giacometti’s source canvas, incite questions around the act of looking and, above all, create an invitation to further study.
