Jutta Koether

Jutta Koether is a German artist, musician and critic based in New York City and Berlin since the early 1990s.

Koether's paintings are exercises in color, line, form and pattern and often feature text. Her style has precedent in the work of Sigmar Polke and Kenny Scharf. She is also inspired by artists and intellectuals who have created an alternative to mainstream culture, including underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger and musician Patti Smith. She has collaborated with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon on a number of projects, for example Her Noise at Tate Modern in 2005. Koether's work is also affiliated with Martin Kippenberger. Their relationship began in Cologne when she interviewed him for Spex magazine. Although her work is not as grandiose as Kippenberger, both their works engage with the dense history of European, and more specifically, German painting.

For much of the 1990s, she mixed graffiti-inspired brushwork, fluorescent colors (especially bright pink), fragmented images and assorted quotations on surfaces that had a vibrant, all-over undergrowth. Her solo show at Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, in 1997 featured a soundtrack by the artist, accompanied by Tom Verlaine. Her visionary work, according to The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, sees painting as multipurpose.

Koether's 2009 show entitled Lux Exterior at Reena Spaulings further explored a common thematic in her work, the relation of painting with other aspects of theoretical and counter culture. Koether's 2009 show was discussed in David Joselit's essay entitled Painting Beside Itself. The exhibition, which included a painting entitled Hot Rod (after Poussin) (2009) along with sculptural found objects and a series of three performances, was noted by Joselit as a "sophisticated response to the question which I began does a painting belong to a network?"In spring 2012, Koether took part in the three-month exposition of Whitney Biennial. Around that time, she conceived two large series of works that respond directly to the French artist Nicolas Poussin, a reinterpretation of his The Seven Sacraments reimagined as a series of installations, and Seasons (2012), a response to Poussin's The Four Seasons.

Since 1985, Koether has also worked as a reviewer and editor for many magazines and journals such as Spex, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art and Artscribe.

Koether has taught at many institutions, including Columbia University, the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Yale University, and Bard College. Currently, she is a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023