JUTTA KOETHER
ÄNDERUNGEN ALLER ART
21.01. – 11.03.2007
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1, 3005 Bern
T 41 31 350 00 40 F 41 31 350 00 41
info [at] kunsthalle-bern.ch
Jutta Koether is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. Yet she is more than just a painter. She is also a performance artist, musician, writer and theoretician. . Her role as an artist was long reduced to being regarded as a feminist response to a specific scene of the late 1980s in Cologne, Germany. With her translucent color fields, the gestural brush stroke, drawings of female bodies and the lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, she frequently seems to assume positions in contrast to artists such as Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen. As critic and editor of the music and pop culture magazine Spex and as performance artist and musician, however, Koether did not fit the typical image of the art scene of that time. Since the start of her artistic career Jutta Koether has sought to make expansion her program. At the same time, it has always been important to her not to take an unequivocal role as an artist, but always to work from several positions.
Since coming to New York in the 1990s, she moves in an expanded field of experiment and improvisation, literature and theory in the New York scene. Cooperation with musicians like Tom Verlaine (Television) or Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth) often provides her with more important inspiration than the work of other visual artists. It is specifically through these apparent detours and alternative forms of energy that she has created a kind of free space for herself, which enables a reevaluation of the medium of painting and its potential that is so urgently needed in today’s situation.
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern is Jutta Koether’s first major solo exhibition in Switzerland, showing an extensive selection of her work since the mid-eighties for the first time. With painting, drawings, texts, video works and installations, Jutta Koether occupies all the spaces of the Kunsthalle. She connects her various forms of expression with one another, thus creating experimental arrangements from which a flowing dynamic and openness develop.
Events:
20. 01. 2007, 6 pm: Opening Reception with a performance by Jutta Koether with Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth)
03. 03. 2007, 6pm: Oliver Tepel in Conversation with Jutta Koether
An extensive catalogue is published for the exhibition by the publishing house DuMont Verlag. Essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Isabelle Graw, Martin Prinzhorn, Michael Kerkmann and a conversation with Jutta Koether, Sam Lewitt and Eileen Quinlan examine the various fields of Jutta Koether’s work. The 160-page catalogue includes about 160 color pictures and is published in German and English.
Jutta Koether, born in 1958 in Cologne, lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions and projects include: If I cant Dance, De Appel, Amsterdam; Music is a better Noise, P.S.1 MoMA, Long Island; Artists In & Out of Cologne, The Power Plant, Toronto and the ICA, Philadelphia; Susanne Vielmetter, Culver City; Loveletter, Herald Street, London; Bring the War Home, QED, Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Daniel Buccholz at Metro Pictures, Metro Pictures, New York; La Sphère Punk, Le Magasin Grenoble; An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; The Subversive Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; Whitney Biennial, New York
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern curated by Philippe Pirotte is organised in collaboration with the Kölnischer Kunstverein, where Jutta Koether had an important solo show last year curated by Kathrin Rhomberg.
The exhibition is generously supported by Die Mobiliar Versicherungen & Vorsorge, Stadt und Kanton Bern, Club 15
