Jutta Koether "Lux Interior"
Reena Spaulings Fine Art
This event has ended.
Lux Interior is an exhibition of a single painting by Jutta Koether. Installed on its own wall, with one foot on the stage and one foot off, Hot Rod (after Poussin), 2009 – the artist’s to-scale remake of Poussin’s Landscape with Pyramus and Thisbe, 1651 – receives extra illumination from a vintage scoop light (salvaged from The Saint, an ex-Manhattan night club). The painting’s mostly red palette relates the bloody double suicide in a fable by Ovid (according to which the lovers’ tragedy changes the mulberry tree’s blossoms from white to purple) while inflicting the scene with a lightning storm. Along with the depicted drama, metallic and iridescent pigments disturb the idealized vista. Koether’s “harsh pastoral” and the diagonally broken staging of the work re-enact the horror of tragic miscommunication between two lovers so that Poussin’s allegorical landscape returns as a raw, stripped-down, messed-up and overdosed surface. Here, the sight of death is a seeing-red and a going blind.
Media
Schedule
from April 26, 2009 to May 24, 2009