Jutta Koether

Jutta Koether is a painter, but she also works and plays with other artistic genres. For example, she writes texts about other people’s art, or organizes performances in which she also plays music.

Jutta Koether likes to use the color red in her works, in all kinds of nuances. Depending on what she wants to express with the picture, the color takes on different meanings: pain, shame, hysteria, intensity, aggression, provocation, make-up, desire or being a woman.

Jutta Koether grew up in Cologne, where she studied philosophy and art education. At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of artists caused a stir there: the Neuen Wilden, or new wild ones, most of whom were male painters. Jutta exchanged views with them, but as a woman she often had the impression that she didn’t really belong. She felt she had to—and wanted to! —go her own way.

The strokes Jutta Koether makes with the brush in “Fresh Aufhebung” (2004) are wildly distributed and intertwined, almost as if a labyrinth is being created on the canvas. Sometimes the lines are very thin and delicate, so that the canvas shines through; at other times Jutta uses so much paint that a thick crust remains, covering everything.

In the early 1990s, Jutta Koether moved to New York. There she painted pictures and invited people to participate in different ways.

In some of her works, Jutta Koether seems to trace with her brush the engagement of earlier artists, such as Nicolas Poussin, with their work, and to continue it herself.

Jutta Koether enjoys unravelling artworks, placing them in different contexts, looking for meanings in them, talking to others about them and perhaps discovering something that has not been said about the works before. She believes it is very important to look at paintings closely.