Jutta Koether: Songs of New York

from far, far away, late in the evening. I loved it, then looked in vain for anything else in this unruly show that reminded me of it.The show, which collects work made primarily from 1996 to 2008, seeks to make a virtue of Koether’s restlessness. In addition to painting, Koether has long written criticism and made music, collaborating with downtown eminences likeKim Gordon and Tom Verlaine. In the era covered by this show, Koether the painter seemed to be trying on a number of modes just to see what fit, which is a fruitful artistic practice but one that, in this case, generated a kind of grab bag of images.A few caught my attention: Large, off-white oils portrayed wild-colored hereafters inspired byWilliam Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”; other abstracts were defaced with snaking lines or obliterated with furious swipes of white paint. In the back of the first floor, three hulking black canvases could themselves have been windows opening from the bright gallery onto a dark night, but on closer inspection revealed scrapes, hashes, and text in colorful metallic ballpoint. The result resembled nothing so much as the childhood craft with which I was once obsessed, in which I scratched designs into a black-painted board to reveal the rainbow of colors beneath. I was reminded upstairs of another kindergarten art-class standard—the thumbprint paintings ofEd Emberley —while standing before “I Choose Everything,” a whimsical 11x15 grid of pastel dabs of paint, most enclosing within them a tiny cartoon smiley.In comparing these works to children’s art projects I don’t mean to belittle Koether. In fact, it seemed to me that the playful, experimental delight she takes in mark-making was what cohered these many explorations on paper and canvas. Children, of course, love drawing faces—those are the marks they return to over and over, and faces recur throughout the show. Nearby, dots and (yes) thumbprints festooned a caseful of 2001 drawings; a grinning face wrapped right over the edge of one stapled canvas. Those white marks on the black painting downstairs now seemed to me less like faraway lights and more like predators’ eyes in a dark forest.Finally, I approached Koetther’s three “Metal Maniacs” pieces, from 2008, experiments in elemental mark-making in which the artist scratched and deformed squares of mirrored silver foil. I searched for a face in these blank, reflective creations, only to realize when I stared into one that the face, warped and laughing in the mirror, was my own.