Jutta Koether

Songs of New York

8 September -
31 October 2026

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, however, 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, our new 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 in the following year, featuring a central field of abstract gestural marks, a floating record, face, and amplifier that burst out of a grid-like structure.

This dialogue between possibility and constraint continued into the 2000s through exhibitions such as Songs of New York &c (1997) at Pat Hearn Gallery and Extremes Europa (2002) at Galerie Buchholz. During these years, Koether’s painting expanded dramatically, embracing extremes of scale, surface, and gesture: large-format canvases alongside intimate works; pitch-black canvases marked by delicate lines in metallic pens alongside all-over compositions in vivid colors; formless gestural masses alongside grids of controlled painterly marks, smiley-faced heads, and exploding suns. Rather than resolving these oppositions, her paintings use them as simultaneous productive states.

For Koether, one important recurrent reference point was William Blake’s early Romantic illuminated book Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in which poetry and painting converge to confront the conflicting but inseparable states that constitute human existence. Koether’s engagement with Blake was not limited to her paintings: in 1996, she named her new SPEX column Songs of New York, in which she traced her transatlantic position in writing. The page and the canvas, again, became parallel spaces of production: the rectangular geometry of the journalist’s office overlapped with that of the painter’s studio, forming a multidimensional site of production.

While Koether’s writing within these texts remained experimental in its perspectives and language, it gradually moved toward a more journalistic form, particularly in contrast to her earlier 1980s column written under the pseudonym Mrs. Benway. This transformation unfolded alongside the painterly expansion of the same period. Increasingly, writing migrated more freely into the paintings themselves, recalling Blake’s illuminated landscapes: a complex construction in which image and text cannot be separated, and in which the dialectic of enclosure and openness brings forward a new way of working.