Jutta Koether’s Grid paintings dialogue with Giacometti’s perception
The German artist's first solo exhibition at the New York gallery reveals a new series of canvases created in conversation with a seminal work from the Metropolitan Museum's collection.
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Jutta Koether’s new body of work emerges from an encounter with Alberto Giacometti’s radical investigations into the nature of seeing. Twelve canvases, each layered with the artist’s characteristic Grid vocabulary, exist in direct conversation with Giacometti’s “Still Life with an Apple” from 1937, a work held within the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. The dialogue between these two artists unfolds across the gallery walls at 19 East 64th Street, revealing how abstraction and observation intertwine across decades.
The title “tRaVeLiNgliGHt” itself moves across the surface like illumination, suggesting movement and flux within apparently static forms. Koether’s canvases embrace this paradox through their layered grids, where the eye travels through passages of colour and line, finding rest in unexpected places. The deliberate fragmentation of the exhibition title mirrors the visual rhythms within the paintings themselves, where upper and lower case letters dance across the composition, refusing singular meaning or fixed interpretation.
What emerges from this exhibition is a meditation on the act of unmaking as making. Giacometti’s own words, “I am only making by unmaking”, pulse beneath Koether’s practice, suggesting that every mark, every grid, every incision into the canvas surface represents a process of refinement and questioning. The Grid paintings series, in this new incarnation, strips away excess in service of essential form, yet simultaneously accumulates layers of visual information, building complexity through apparent reduction.
The works on view possess a luminous quality, their surfaces activated by Koether’s rigorous exploration of colour relationships and spatial recession. Within the disciplined framework of the grid, freedom emerges. The paintings breathe with the energy of a practice continuously interrogating its own methods, each canvas a fresh investigation into how vision itself might be mapped and reconfigured.
Koether’s engagement with Giacometti’s still life extends beyond quotation into something more profound: a shared commitment to stripping visual experience down to its essence, to revealing what persists when everything extraneous falls away. In these twelve new works, the artist continues her ongoing conversation with modernism’s fundamental questions about perception, representation and the stubborn, radiant life of paint on canvas.
Imagery courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan (@levygorvydayan).
