Cecily Brown & Jutta Koether “Good Luck Spot”

Bortolami

This event has ended.

Bortolami presents an exhibition of recent paintings by Cecily Brown and Jutta Koether.

The exhibition acts as both a meeting place and an opportunity for exchange between two artists who intrepidly engage the tradition of painting. For the past few decades, Brown and Koether have respectively negotiated centuries of painting for our contemporary moment, tarrying with what can be gathered, layered, and reformulated from these processes of transmission. Mining a wide range of sources, each artist has resolved a unique and identifiable style of their own: Koether, a fluid storyteller with a quivering line and compulsive red chroma, and Brown in her robust brushstrokes which seemingly build pictorial spaces in their simultaneous process of deconstruction. The reciprocal exhibition between two of today’s most celebrated painters offers a site to visualize the contours of each artist’s approach, as well as a stage to borrow and translate, blurring delineations of authorship.

Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London) lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1993 and has worked in New York since 1994. Brown’s work is deceptively paradoxical, combining figuration and extreme abstraction, simultaneously moving between the ephemeral and the corporeal, a fascination with the Old Masters, Romanticism, and the Impressionists, amongst others, in tandem with her observations of modern and contemporary artists, and popular culture.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2023); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2022); The Triumph of Death, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy (2022); Blenheim Art Foundation, Blenheim Park, England (2020); and Cecily Brown: Where, When, How Often and with Whom, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2018-19). Public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Tate, London, England. The paintings by Brown in Good Luck Spot are presented in collaboration with Paula Cooper Gallery.

Jutta Koether, born in Cologne, lives and works in Berlin and New York. Since the 1980s, she has been developing an alternative genealogy and practice of painting that have decisively shaped the current understanding of the medium. She programmatically connects her painting to performance, music, and textual production, and works and worked in collaborative projects with Reena Spaulings, Tom Verlaine, Steven Parrino, John Miller, Tony Conrad, and Kim Gordon, among others.

Koether’s work was the subject of a comprehensive survey exhibition at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich and the Mudam in Luxembourg in 2018 and 2019. Other exhibitions of her work have been held at Artium Museoa in Vitoria- Gasteiz (2022), Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (2019), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2013), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2011), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2009), and Kunsthalle Bern (2009). Her works are in collections of international museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Berlin National Gallery, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna, Museum Ludwig Cologne, and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Koether has been a professor of painting and drawing at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts since 2010. Previously, she taught at Columbia University, Cooper Union School of Art and School of Visual Art in New York, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, Yale University in New Haven, Universität der Künste in Berlin and Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen, among others.