Jutta Koether: Songs of New York at Galerie Buchholz — Painting, Music, Writing, and the City
Returning to a formative chapter in her transatlantic practice, Jutta Koether turns New York into both subject and method in an exhibition spanning paintings, texts, gesture, memory, and cultural collision.
New York has always been more than a backdrop for Jutta Koether.
For the German-born artist, the city became a place of transformation—a new context through which painting, music, writing, criticism, and personal experience could collide. At Galerie Buchholz in Midtown, Songs of New York revisits that relationship through works dating from 1995 onward, tracing a period when Koether’s practice expanded dramatically in scale, surface, gesture, and conceptual ambition.
On view from September 8 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition occupies Galerie Buchholz’s New York space at 31 West 54th Street. It is the gallery’s second exhibition devoted to Koether in New York, following 1982, 1983, 1984 in 2024. It is also the gallery’s eleventh solo exhibition with the artist since their first collaboration in Cologne in 1996.
But Songs of New York is not simply a retrospective of selected paintings.
It is an exploration of how a city can become a language.
New York as “Self-Displacement”
Koether moved from Cologne to New York at the beginning of the 1990s. She later described the move as a process of “self-displacement”—a deliberate distancing from the established Cologne art environment that allowed her to reposition herself.
The move did not erase her earlier identity.
Instead, it created a transatlantic practice in which Cologne and New York, European art history and American popular culture, painting and writing could exist simultaneously.
That tension is central to Songs of New York.
The exhibition begins in 1995, with works that reflect Koether’s encounter with the city and its cultural energy. Among them is Dance at Madison Square Garden (1995), a large oil painting based on an earlier painting of Madison Square Garden that Koether acquired with musician Tom Verlaine at the Chelsea Flea Market.
The work transforms a familiar New York landmark into something more ambiguous: a space of spectacle, memory, light, movement, and artistic appropriation.
The city becomes an image—but also a source material.
From SPEX to the Canvas
Koether’s relationship with New York was never confined to painting.
She was also a writer and cultural observer. In 1996, she named a new column for the German music magazine SPEX Songs of New York, using writing to explore her transatlantic position.
The title eventually became a conceptual bridge between her journalism and her painting.
For Koether, the page and the canvas could function as parallel spaces. Both were rectangular fields in which fragments of culture, language, gesture, quotation, memory, and personal experience could be organized—and disrupted.
This relationship between text and image remains one of the most distinctive aspects of her practice.
Words can appear within paintings without behaving like conventional captions. Marks can resemble writing without necessarily becoming readable sentences. The viewer moves between deciphering and looking.
The painting becomes something closer to a visual score.
Painting at the Edge of Control
The works gathered in Songs of New York demonstrate how Koether’s painting evolved during the 1990s and early 2000s.
Her canvases move between extremes.
Some are enormous. Others are intimate.
Some are dark and nearly monochromatic, marked with delicate metallic lines. Others erupt with intense color, gestural masses, grids, faces, symbols, and radiating forms.
This contrast between control and excess is not resolved.
It is maintained.
A painting can appear carefully structured while simultaneously threatening to break apart. A grid can contain an explosion. A gesture can become architecture. A recognizable symbol can dissolve into abstraction.
Koether’s paintings therefore resist the expectation that a single visual language should dominate an artwork.
Instead, contradiction becomes part of the method.
William Blake and the Illuminated Painting
One of the exhibition’s important intellectual reference points is William Blake.
Koether repeatedly returned to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the eighteenth-century artist-poet’s illuminated book in which poetry and visual art are inseparable.
That connection helps explain the significance of Songs of New York.
Koether’s work similarly refuses a strict separation between writing and painting.
The title is not simply a reference to the city. It places New York within a larger history of illuminated books, experimental writing, popular music, painting, and cultural criticism.
The canvas becomes a page.
The page becomes a painting.
And the city becomes the material connecting them.
Among the exhibition’s works are WB II (William Blake / He felt the female & c) (1997), WB IV (Walter Benjamin) (1997), and The au-déla (1997), demonstrating how literary and philosophical references become integrated into Koether’s visual vocabulary.
Music as a Visual Force
Music is another persistent current.
Koether’s practice has long crossed between visual art and musical culture. Her collaborations and artistic relationships have included figures such as Tom Verlaine, Tony Conrad, Kim Gordon, John Miller, and others.
That musical dimension can be felt in the titles, rhythms, repetitions, abrupt shifts, and energetic surfaces of the paintings.
Love Call of Life & Song of Action (1997), for example, takes the form of a monumental diptych. Each canvas measures more than two meters in height, turning painting into something closer to an environmental experience.
The work does not merely sit on the wall.
It occupies it.
The scale creates a physical relationship between the viewer and the painted surface, while the division into two panels introduces a rhythm similar to a musical pairing or call-and-response.
The City as Cultural Collision
What makes Koether’s New York particularly interesting is that it is not presented as a straightforward urban documentary.
There are no simple attempts to capture “New York life.”
Instead, the city operates as a collision of references.
Madison Square Garden can coexist with Walter Benjamin.
William Blake can appear alongside contemporary music culture.
Personal experience can overlap with art history.
A newspaper-like structure can merge with gestural abstraction.
The city becomes an environment where different cultural frequencies overlap.
That approach feels especially relevant in contemporary New York, where visual culture, fashion, music, publishing, nightlife, galleries, digital media, and global art networks constantly intersect.
Koether’s paintings anticipated that kind of cultural simultaneity without reducing it to a single aesthetic.
A Transatlantic Artist in New York
Koether was born in Cologne in 1958 and lives and works between New York, Berlin, and Cologne.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including major presentations at Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Mudam Luxembourg, Museum Abteiberg, Moderna Museet, Van Abbemuseum, and other institutions.
Her work is also held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
That institutional history places Songs of New York within a broader reassessment of an artist whose practice has consistently moved between disciplines.
Painting has remained central, but painting alone does not adequately describe the territory.
Writing matters.
Music matters.
Performance matters.
Art history matters.
The social world matters.
A Different Kind of New York Portrait
In the end, Songs of New York is less a portrait of the city than a portrait of what happens to an artist when she enters a new cultural environment.
New York changes the scale.
It changes the references.
It changes the speed.
It changes the vocabulary.
But Koether does not simply absorb the city.
She argues with it.
She filters it through European art history, experimental writing, popular music, personal memory, feminist perspectives, philosophy, and the physical act of painting.
The result is a body of work in which New York becomes simultaneously location, archive, soundtrack, studio, and subject.
That may be the lasting power of Songs of New York.
The city is not painted as a postcard.
It is painted as an ongoing conversation.
And in Koether’s hands, that conversation never settles into one voice.
