Jutta Koether

Narrator: These four paintings, mounted on glass, are Jutta Koether’s The Seasons. In this installation, Winter faces outward. Autumn is on the backside of Winter, and forms a kind of cycle with Spring, Summer, and the window of the Museum.

The paintings are based on a series by the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, which is in the Louvre. Poussin is important to Koether because he was a very philosophical painter. In a sense, he laid the groundwork for her own conceptual approach to painting.

Traditionally, paintings of the four seasons have harmonized the human life cycle with nature. As the terms “Arab Spring” and “Greek Summer” suggest, that impulse still exists.

Jutta Koether: In the tumultuous sort of moments of history people try to in a way connect it back to the tumultuous uncontrollable forces of nature. And at the same time, we are at a point where it’s hard to differentiate whether the tumultuous events in nature are manmade or natural.

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