Jutta Koether: ŒuVreS réCEnteS

ŒuVreS réCEnteS is Jutta Koether’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel. Presenting a new body of work, it marks her return to Paris, where she lived for a few months in the early 1990s, and revisits some of the artistic and literary references that have shaped her practice. Koether draws on a wide range of sources from the history of painting, revisiting artists such as Cy Twombly, Frank Auerbach, Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti. For her, appropriation is neither quotation nor homage but a strategy for bringing images from different periods and seemingly incompatible sources into contact. Painting’s history becomes not a fixed legacy to be preserved but a living field to be questioned, transformed and expanded. Made to be experienced in person, the works reveal themselves gradually. The eye roams across their surfaces, catches a fragment of writing, follows a detail and makes unexpected connections. Literary references, musical associations and photographic images surface and intertwine, opening multiple paths through the paintings. Looking becomes, in the artist’s words, a kind of “Spiritual Hunt”, after the title of an apocryphal text attributed to Rimbaud. Diptych and triptych formats let these relationships unfold like a musical composition, images resonating from one panel to the next. WiCkeD ChArM, the large painting that greets visitors at the entrance, gathers many of these concerns and works as a methodological manifesto. An androgynous, blue-eyed figure emerges from a dense field of gestures, reds and pinks, fragments of writing, ribbons, apples and flowers. The painting brings together two distant images: a self-portrait by Francesca Woodman, seated on a chair with her face hidden by her long hair and a mirror between her legs, and Frank Auerbach’s portrait of Arthur Rimbaud. Neither remains fully recognisable; both persist beneath layers of paint and writing, transformed yet still perceptible. Nearby, HoLDiNg features a red curtain – a recurring motif in Koether’s work since 1987 – evoking the conditions of painting itself: a surface that both reveals and conceals, opening onto an image while withholding it. The inscription “Chair de fleur”, found in WiCkeD ChArM and other works, recalls Rimbaud’s fusion of nature, sensuality and the body in poems such as Soleil et Chair and Les Réparties de Nina. Throughout the exhibition desire takes shape in the interplay of bodies, words and colours. Recurring reds and pinks heighten the sensuous atmosphere, while flowers dominate the large triptychs ChAiR dE fLEuR and NoURiR sA ViE, each centred on a gigantic bloom – desire as a force spreading across the canvas without ever settling. Their exuberance is countered by a small black flower-shaped painting whose dense, glossy surface extends Koether’s long exploration of black not as absence but as a space of intensity that draws attention to the materiality of the work and the physical act of painting. The apple, emblem of desire and temptation, multiplies across the triptych trAnSBoRDeUSeS. Drawing on Cézanne’s still lifes and an early Giacometti painting of apples on a stool, the fruit shifts from isolated object to recurring pictorial element; repeated across the surface, the “Pink Lady” takes on a rhythmic quality, almost like a musical note. It returns in AmOuR dE loiN, punctuating the curtain above an elongated reclining male figure. Based on a 1929 photograph of Pierre Bonnard posing as an odalisque in Henri Matisse’s studio in Nice, the painting upends the gender conventions of the odalisque, a figure long tied to Orientalism, while the reclining pose, also recalling the Deposition, adds a note of vulnerability. Words recur across the surfaces as both carriers of meaning and visual gestures. “Art Lives On”, inscribed in another painting, borrows the slogan that greets visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which Koether has visited week after week for years, seeing the same paintings from ever-changing perspectives. In ŒuVreS réCEnteS the phrase becomes an affirmation of images’ capacity to outlive their makers, travel across times and contexts and return transformed. Art history remains open, changing with every encounter – and perhaps what these paintings ask is not to be deciphered, but for us to keep moving, following unexpected connections and letting meaning emerge along the way.