At the show with the artist: Jutta Koether lights up Rosso Fiorentino, Piero di Cosimo and Botticelli
It is said that art is good when it generates other art. With this is in mind we would like to introduce you three paintings by Jutta Koether recently exhibited at Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich. They re-enact three paintings by Piero di Cosimo, Rosso Fiorentino and Sandro Botticelli. Along with the works, Koether has written a brief introduction about the relation between her paintings and these three carefully selected pieces. This writing was conceived by the artist as part of the exhibition. We copy and paste it here below, considering it a “spontaneous” guide to light up not only the magnetic Koether’s approach to painting and her unique way of linking form and information, but also to have an exclusive sight on three of the most “conceptualizable” old masters. Please also note that the images of these three paintings were not part in any way of Koether’s exhibition at Galerie Francesca Pia. We have included them in our gallery just to help, and possibly inspire, our readers.
3. Cosimo Piero Gemäldegalerie Studies of bodies in transformation. Coolness is another form of resistance, which this picture steers for. The Bruised Grids function here as a pillow. The model was owned by Vasari. It was itself an appropriative picture, had a similarity with Venus and Mars by Botticelli. Panofsky described the 1505 painting by Cosimo as „an enchanting primitivist pastoral“, as a depiction of an exchange of emotions and passion, enabled by the in fact not perfect bodies in an interplay of signals, colors, symbols, among others a phallic reef and a type of butterflies, the „beautiful little mistress“ (Callimorpha dominula). The pictorial space can format and re-format itself as a narrow intense hermetic and/or an open spreading space. The painting is a site of daydreaming: To put oneself into multiple social skins, into excited masquerades of the strung out loose bodies that transform into landscapes…“Pulsing with motions of compression and dispersion in varying temporal and spatial formats“.
4. Fiorentino Rosso Sansepolcro Another journey in a different timeframe. Painted in 1528 by a stubborn autodidact, who dedicated himself to Florentine red tones, to Italian Mannerism of the sixteenth century, heavily interspersed with elements of Northern European Renaissance and then co-founder of the First School of Fontainebleau. The consequences of the drastic deposition (the decent from the cross) can be traced up to Beckmann and Freud. Christ’s body after the deposition, held by other figures and circumstances, hence by the social body, crosses through and divides the painting. So the full picture could be understood as a body, a pictorial body nailed to the pillar in the gallery space, the exhibition is „performed“ as some sort of crucifixion. Eroticizing foreignness radiates off the surfaces treated with very different materials. Dissolution of the border between sight and flesh with diverse possibilities to touch and transgress.
6. Botticelli Medaille Stettheimer Botticelli’s young man with the gold coin, on which there is an image of Cosimo de Medici from 1474 hangs in the Uffici not too far from an entombment scene by Rogier von der Weyden. The coin, plastically crafted on a painted ground, shows a man of power of the time. End point of the exhibition and promise and potential for an opening into a new room space to come. While staging a peephole into the far and recent past at once. Impossible lens. Focus: Painting asserted as original text. Maybe at this point one should refuse every other means of communication? Penetrate history’s matrix in an original, painterly, insisting way and through techniques, decor, effects, crusts and noise into the brutalist zones of painting. Post web art, make-up- and make-over arts play a role. As well as Stettheimer (who named this painting a source for her work) and Freud. In the end what counts is to paint what can never be painted to the end. Art fed with exciting personality and living history. Return of the resurrections. Through „copying“: radical intensifying of the pictures’ reality. The job is never done.
Quoted from the unpublished text written by Jutta Koether in occasion of the exhibition “Maquis” at Galerie Francesca Pia (August 29 – November 1, 2014)
November 21, 2022
