Campoli Presti is pleased to present Jutta Koether's fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Questioning the traditional hierarchies of painting, Koether’s work deconstructs the distinction between copy and original. Painting opens up a broader discursive space through the incorporation of performance and the appropriation of art historical subjects and positions. In Best of Studios, Koether reframes the position of painting as a resistant body whose experimental character addresses the digital condition in which painting operates.

Central to the exhibition are two large works from Koether's recent series of Bruised Grid paintings. Grids have been used in her practice since 2000. The 12-inch square grids began in 2007 and have been shown in interaction with other figurative works or as performing agents in lectures. Koether's gridded works thwart the geometrical landmark of Western Art while defining a field of play. By addressing the attraction between archaism and metrics, Koether's systematic application engages the viewer in a micro-contemplation, as if the viewer was picking up pennies from the ground.

As a counterpart to the comprehensive, external perspective of painting suggested by the gridded works, K-Bild, Withers Plant and VLP Plant address the internal sphere in which art also circulates. In K-Bild the artist inscribes herself into the layers and brings language into painting. Part of Koether's consideration of painting as an actual body, the thick, almost independent materiality of the impasto gives the work a physical, substantial appearance.

Through insisting, noisy techniques of applying paint in deliberated zones, Koether penetrates into the historical organization of painting's different fields of passage.

Jutta Koether (1958) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Koether has an upcoming survey exhibition at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2018) that will travel to the Serralves Museum, Portugal. Her work forms part of the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Nationalgalerie, Berlin and Kunsthalle Bern. Koether has had solo exhibitions at DCA – Dundee Contemporary Arts (2013); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2011); Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2008); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2007) and Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2006). Her work was included in the 2014 Shanghai Biennial; in the Whitney Biennials in 2012 and 2006 and in the 2012 Sao Paulo Biennial.