Jutta Koether

The way you involve yourself in painting—its performance, reception, its embodied experience—inevitably throws into doubt the dimension of criticality in and of art itself. Walking that line has led me to deal with the historical baggage and trajectories that painting and performance share. When I first got involved in art making, I tried to find ways to pull painting into a problematized terrain where it could perform change on its own terms; where it could deal with its own broken history, its pleasures and pains, and formulate my own Meditation on the Passion. 

This happened to the sound of punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Cologne. I learned to stretch, flex, imagine, wander, and improvise, and became an artist outside the academic system. I applied that experience to the canvas, asking: "Why must feminist art practices perform 'otherness' in an 'other' medium? Why not in painting?" Painting colored my mind ever since and eventually led me to the United States, extending the cabinet of fragmented creatures and collaborators that chose painting to playfully perform their existence with/on.

Since the 1980s, Jutta Koether has developed an alternative genealogy and practice of painting that has shaped the current understanding of the medium. Koether’s paintings confront the conditions of their own production as a site of reflection on the act of looking and the different perspectives this act raises, depending on who is looking, how, and when. She accentuates a counter-history to the male-dominated art historical canon, claiming a space usually occupied by male painters through her grotesque and guttural works. Koether’s multifaceted oeuvre goes back to her beginnings in the context of Neo-Expressionism in Cologne and her subsequent exploration of the color red as an expressive device—asserting a distinctly female response to the cliché of male painter subjects. After moving to New York in the 1990s, she began making colorful large-scale paintings that layer motifs from pop culture, literature, and art history in dense painterly gestures. Since the early 2000s, Koether has become increasingly involved with performance and music, resulting in inky black canvases and assemblage paintings that incorporate devotional objects from punk and noise culture.

Koether’s exploration of the unstable subject position, the blurring delineations of biographies, and the fundamental unfinishedness of its interpretation have arrived at new thresholds that inundate the viewer with challenges and demands. What counted and still counts for her are the myriad discourses and expansions of painting, the discontinuities and connections, as well as the sense of flux around the inception and ends of popular and non-popular cultures in an era she experienced in active, communal correspondence and engagement.

Tour de Madame, a comprehensive survey exhibition of Koether’s work that encompassed over 150 paintings, was presented at the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany and the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM) in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg in 2018 and 2019. Other exhibitions include 1982, 1983, 1984, Galerie Buchholz, New York, NY (2024); Good Luck Spot Part II, Bortolami, New York, NY (2023); eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe, Reena Spaulings, New York, NY (2022); Black Place, Artium Museo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2022); and Libertine, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2019).

Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA; the Berlin National Gallery, Berlin, Germany; the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 

Koether served as Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and previously taught at Columbia University, Cooper Union School of Art, and School of Visual Arts, Bard College, Yale University, Universität der Künste, and Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, among others.