How Jutta Koether Made A Color Her Signature Style

When you walk through a show,” Martin Kippenberger observed to Jutta Koether when she interviewed him in 1991, “some of the pictures are good and some of them are bad. Then there’s possible controversy.” It may seem like a simple observation—until he explains that that’s what he was for. “And not, please, where everything is equally good…. When everything is good, none of it counts. God, in the beginning, wanted that a bit differently. Both good and bad were supposed to exist. But contrasts and dialectic,” Kippenberger lamented, “have disappeared in art.” Had oppositional energy and the willingness to test the good against the bad really walked off the field of art? If only Kippenberger had looked more deeply into the art of his interlocutor, he would not have been so sure. Just five years younger than Kippenberger, Koether was part of a new cohort on the Cologne art scene—which in the ’80s and early ’90s was certainly the most dynamic and socially ebullient in Europe, populated by the most audacious artists—and she was already painting her way toward what she’d later call “the limit where knowledge offers itself as a resource for acting, no longer for the peace of the understanding but at the mercy of the alluring forces of chaos.” Yet the fact that Koether felt it necessary to distance herself from the context that gave her the problems that became the material of her work seems characteristic. German painting circa 1980—what was that? It was, for instance, the pure chill of Gerhard Richter’s “capitalist realism,” seemingly an armor with no chinks in it; this did not have much to offer an artist like Koether. Or it was the raucous hullabaloo of Jörg Immendorff’s “Café Deutschland” series, with its colorfully convivial disorder. Perhaps most sympathetically, though Koether has said she was slow to appreciate him, it was the mercurial presence of Sigmar Polke, who always seemed to play hide-and-seek with his identity as a painter and to contradict himself at every turn. KOETHER WAS BORN in Cologne in 1958 and studied not at the renowned nearby art academy of Düsseldorf, where professors such as Bernd Becher, Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Richter had held forth—the age of famous and charismatic women professors was still in the future there—but rather at Cologne’s university, where she studied philosophy as well as art. Or rather, as she explained to Benjamin Buchloh in a long 2016 interview that remains the best account of her work’s history, she was “part of a philosophically oriented seminar with a pedagogue…who had studied with Joseph Beuys and then gone to Paris and studied with Jacques Lacan.” She considered doing a PhD on writer-director Antonin Artaud, of Theatre of Cruelty fame. There must have been a lot to sort out at that time of strong ideological conflicts: Philosophy versus art (or, let’s say, writing versus making) would have been only the beginning. If art, then the question would be, in what form? Painting itself was contested—for or against? (And those against would have been happy to declare: No contest.) And then of course, since as it turned out Koether did opt to make painting central to her art (without making it her exclusive focus), there was the problem of how to pursue the claims of feminism in the face of an art scene in which painting was marked by a notoriously macho ethos. Right from the beginning of her practice, Koether already knew that problems are just the material you have to work with. As she told Kim Gordon in a 2011 interview, “I also like to incorporate living social facts from a point of view that is shaped by the female experience. I like to do things with painting that men cannot do. And yet finding the knowledge of the other doesn’t mean to limit yourself, or self-marginalization…. Not to stabilize expectations but to confound them. Even those of your friends. Even your own.” Even after Koether started exhibiting as an artist in 1985, she kept one foot outside the art world. “My home base,” she told Gordon, “was not a gallery or the bar but Spex magazine,” to which she’d begun contributing in 1981. Spex was a legendary music magazine—“legendary” meaning that even those of us who could not read German were aware of it as a cultural force, and “music magazine” meaning, as I understand it, not the specialist self-containment of a fan magazine or trade journal but a publication that uses music as the lens through which to take a wide-ranging critical view on culture and politics. As with so many of us, Koether had grown up with music. As she told me, her childhood included “classical piano lessons, school choir, church singing, and the limited but eclectic record collection of my father—Maria Callas, military trumpet music, Ray Charles—and all kinds of music on the radio,” all of which led to her “early interest in rock/pop music culture as a nonhierarchical way of cultural learning, gaining access, participation, into a public realm.” Koether’s been making her own music ever since, often in collaboration with fellow artists: Her 2010 LP XXX Macarena was a collaboration with Tony Conrad and John Miller, while her untitled cassette with Steven Parrino was released in 2005, the year Parrino died in a motorcycle accident. She’s also made music with fellow painter Rita Ackermann, as well as Koether’s late husband, the musician Tom Verlaine, whose pioneering band Television had been a mainstay of the CBGB scene in the 1970s. In the ’80s, Koether also began writing sharp, opinionated criticism for Flash Art, which is how I first came into contact with her during my brief tenure as an editor there. If the likes of Richter, Immendorff, and Polke were established totems of German art when Koether was starting out, there were also younger figures in the limelight. Just slightly older than Koether were the so-called Neue Wilde of Neo-Expressionism, mostly forgotten now (whether rightly or wrongly), who seemed to emerge with great energy but not a lot of critical thinking—whereas Koether set out to marry the two—or their sharper, more disillusioned, more derisive contemporaries: Kippenberger and his pals Werner Büttner, Georg Herold, and the Oehlen brothers. Their work has a staying power that is certainly rooted in its oppositional stance, and they must have made an impression, but there was no way Koether was going to try to become one of the “bad boys.” That’s not just a matter of gender. It also has to do with her way of inhabiting the role of thinker-writer alongside that of intuitive artist. This combination is something that also struck her fellow painter Cecily Brown, who had long been acquainted with Koether and her work but grew closer to her when they made a two-person show together at Bortolami gallery in New York in 2023. As Brown put it, Koether “is the opposite of the ‘dumb painter.’ She straddles ‘painter’ and ‘intellectual’ while making very painterly things. She puts the absurdity of being a painter into a very visual form.” Koether’s paintings have been mostly figurative, and have not taken photography or abstraction as a paradigm: This is what she has in common with most of the boomer-generation German artists who came on the scene just before she did (excepting Albert Oehlen). Painterly gesture is the basis of both her pictorial vocabulary and theirs. But the nature of those gestures is very different. The facture of a painting by Kippenberger or, say, Büttner is typically heavy, punchy, almost coarse, with a blunt energy that does not promise freedom as the Abstract Expressionist gesture might be thought to do. Instead, that generation’s gesture seems to be stymied or to miss its target and end in bitterness—which is precisely what gives these artists’ work at its best a poignancy on the other side of its aggression and humor. Koether’s gesture, by contrast, is typically light, almost nerveless—intentionally weak-looking, it seems, somehow only approximating the forms it sketches out. Her drawing may, like theirs, court a deliberate awkwardness, but the effect is usually less mordant, even affectionate. WHILE THE TENUOUS yet quietly insistent way of handling paint at which Koether eventually arrived stands as an implicit dissent from the macho—one might even say emo—approach of the male painters who dominated the German scene in her early days as an artist, she did not find it all at once. Take the 1983 painting Edie, for instance. (It was shown in 2020 in a show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, comprising both then-new paintings and ones from the 1980s; interrupted by the Covid lockdown, this has been, as far as I know, the largest Koether show in a city that by now should have been the setting for a proper retrospective. But to start, this fall, fans can look forward to a show at Buchholz Galerie’s new New York location.) This thickly painted little canvas depicts a naked, wide-hipped woman, her head cropped off by the top of the canvas, with handless arms folded just above her vulva; against the blank background, red on one side, black on the other, float a couple of egglike forms. It’s as if she wanted to prove that she could pursue the themes of feminist art (from Louise Bourgeois onward) in a painterly idiom that, burdened with the weight of tradition and complicit with what theorist Laura Mulvey had dubbed the “male gaze,” might have been thought inimical to feminism. Or, on the contrary, might it have been imagery of body-oriented feminist art that was the target of Koether’s gimlet eye? The critic Jan Avgikos deemed one untitled 1983 painting in the Lévy Gorvy show “so hideous it’s funny,” adding that in making such a work, Koether had outdone her colleagues: “Many of the infamous male artists in Cologne embraced ugliness with a vengeance, which was adumbrated by a knowingly stupid breed of rotgut humor. Koether also made sport of sacred cows, but with the super-small scale of her work and its amateurish style, she also conveyed vulnerability—something the guys never could have pulled off.” Another of the show’s early paintings, Some Esoteric Sipping (1986)—a title Koether used for more than one painting around this time—is less heavily painted than Edie, and plays with the imagery of organic abstraction, with a vaguely flowerlike form at the top and three tentacular lines springing down from it. This organic metaphor, like the more direct invocation of the female body as an icon, seems to represent another aspect of ostensible artistic sincerity that Koether shows herself inclined to distrust. Her path would not be that easy. The one thing about Some Esoteric Sipping that does predict Koether’s future course is its color palette: mainly a range of reds. On the face of it, there’s something strange about a painter choosing a certain color as a stylistic signature, but—although she has also made black paintings, for instance—Koether has, especially in the last couple of decades, made the low-frequency end of the visible light spectrum her painting’s home territory. I DIDN’T MEET Koether in person until she moved to New York in 1991. I remember being vaguely surprised that she’d done so. I think we suspected Cologne was hipper than New York, and it looked like a very self-referential club that would be difficult to join—so why resign from it? “I had to leave all that behind,” she later explained to Buchloh, “to find my coordinates as an artist on my own. I totally ‘abandoned’ the German cultural sphere and developed a kind of structural sense of disobedience for avoiding the ruts of the patriarchal models still dominant in schools, in the art world, even in activism.” Maybe Koether felt misunderstood in her home country. The critic Isabelle Graw recalled in Artforum in 2006 that “few people in Cologne in the ’80s and early ’90s knew quite what to make of Jutta Koether’s paintings,” while her “writings seemed nearly irreconcilable with her deliberately clumsy, apparently crude pictures.” Her canvases seemed to flirt with a Neo-Expressionism that their milieu—and her own thinking—had decisively rejected. Of course, it’s an exaggeration to say that Koether abandoned the German cultural sphere entirely; she has continued to exhibit her work regularly in her home country, her works are in the collections of many German museums, and for 14 years (beginning in 2010) she was a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Today, she maintains a studio in Berlin as well as in New York. I first went to see her in her studio when she had just arrived, and remembered only recently that this studio visit was part of a kind of group show, organized by artist Eric Oppenheim. The show took place not in a gallery but in a dispersed way across the artists’ studios. “Oppenheim was supposed to bring people by,” Koether told Buchloh, “which he never did. But I used it as a frame for experimenting with my own thing and inviting guests/visitors myself…. I asked people one-on-one to come and look at the painting in progress, and then sit with me and speak about the experience of seeing the painting.” With the painting came a book—she called it a “manual”—containing “all the drawings and visual trajectories of what I was involved in. It was also an emerging social sketchbook, which meant I made reports of each session every night.” The studio had been converted into a kind of theater in which both Koether and I were improvising performers, and the point of the performance was to generate self-consciousness about everything that goes into the ongoing process of art: its making and its reception, its solitary aspects and its social aspects. KOETHER’S LAST NEW York presentation of recent work, “eVEryTHinG WilL ChaNGe” at Reena Spaulings in 2022, persists in my memory as swirls of light, open, translucent touches of red, orange, yellow, green, and blue—but mostly red—that somehow seemed to float just in front of the white ground of the canvas rather than to be truly fixed upon it. The imagery? It seemed to come and go in the air like clouds forming, dissipating, re-forming. The most prominent bit of imagery in Fly Now (2022) is the front of an airplane with its door open and boarding stairs at the ready; the name koether is inscribed on the fuselage next to the door. Beyond that, the canvas mainly features lots of little red circles—bubbles, I’d call them—and a few stray strokes of light green, vaguely reminiscent of foliage; at the top, a Valentine’s heart contains the unintelligible inscription ollodnxx and a couple of neutral-faced (straight-mouthed) emojis. At the bottom, the painting’s title is inscribed, and the words seem to emerge from and lead into a series of letterlike marks that don’t quite add up to any sort of writing. Fly Now might be the poster for an artform conceived of as a vehicle for transport in and out of the realm of determinate meaning. If so, another of the paintings in the show would appear to advise the traveler as to how to identify one’s home in this transient existence. The World (2022) depicts a standing figure in a striped dress, seen from behind, with bare arms outstretched; next to it is the name apollo, lettered once vertically, once horizontally. Whether this is meant to evoke the Greek god of poetry and prophecy or the American space program of the 1960s and ’70s may be a moot question; more important, perhaps, is the inscription in smaller letters at the foot of the painting, which expands on its title: when they ask you where you’re from. the world. It’s a recommendation of cosmopolitanism from an artist who has spoken of herself as “interested in space and time travel,” whose work “comes from a kind of mental traveling, an ongoing search, because you don’t have a fixed historical vision.” Paintings like these seem to celebrate a kind of active uncertainty. Koether’s mark in them is very hard to correctly articulate. I am tempted to call it hesitant, tentative, or approximate, and yet that’s not really right at all. That is, the mark may be approximate or tentative in adumbrating a form—the form may seem to come and go—but in itself, as a presence, the painterly mark asserts itself in a very definite manner, even if that definiteness embodies translucency, sparingness, indirection. They are what Koether has called “plays of lines and colors suggesting the motions of the mind celebrating with garlands…” (excuse me, but I have to interrupt the artist and repeat with an exclamation point that phrase “with garlands”: with garlands!—the phrase suggests an arcadian or pastoral mode, which is perhaps not surprising in an artist who has made paintings inspired by those of the Baroque artist Nicolas Poussin) “…the fact that we still do not know where Bewusstsein, or consciousness, occurs in the human mind.” This garlanded play of mind, as it is communicated through Koether’s art, has nothing heavy or brooding about it. This has something to do with her idea that painting is intertwined with performance, which contributes a peculiar energy to her work. Still, it’s easy to think of her as simply a painter: In fact, when I started writing this, I had the impression that I’d never seen one of Koether’s performances, but then I remembered that that’s not quite the case—there was that studio-visit-as-performance I’d played a small part in. This bears out something that Koether’s former student Ei Arakawa-Nash, the performance artist who is representing Japan at this year’s Venice Biennale, told me: “What I learned from Jutta is a certain form of appropriation in which the artist’s persona is not something to hide behind, nor something to present as authentic. Instead, it can be treated as material.” He added, “Jutta’s work has been very influential for me, especially in thinking about performance not only as an event but also as a way of making visible the conditions surrounding art, authorship, and public appearance—even as it risks collapsing into itself.” The fact that I hadn’t remembered our first studio visit as a performative event may even mean that it was quite successful: I incorporated this self-consciousness into my thoughts about painting without leaving a remainder to be set apart as “performance.” And yet it fed into my awareness that painting is always performed, and so is the appreciation of painting. In Koether’s case, I see that the process can go on indefinitely.