Jutta Koether

Integral to Jutta Koether’s practice is the consideration of how to make painting relevant in the environment of today’s art world. Her four paintings featured in the 2012 Biennial reference the seventeenth-century French classical artist Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting cycle The Four Seasons (1660–64). Koether goes beyond the traditional notion, however, to represent new “seasons” that reflect the rhythms of contemporary life, such as those of the fashion world and financial markets. In contrast to the quiet precision of Poussin’s work, the visceral, rough, and raw brushstrokes that activate these canvases question the bourgeois sensibility—exemplified by Poussin—that is sometimes associated with the field of painting.

Mounted on transparent glass panels and installed in front of one of the museum’s windows, Koether’s images interact with the building’s architecture to become, in her words, a site-specific “window onto a window.” She challenges her audience to reconsider the framework through which they see and interpret paintings. Incorporating the display standards of an exhibition space as an element of her work is a common strategy for Koether, who is often as concerned with the context in which her paintings are shown as she is with the paintings themselves.

Koether has had solo exhibitions at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, VanAbbemuseum in institutions such as Eindhoven, Kunsthalle Bern, MoMA P.S. 1, Swiss Institute in New York, and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Her work has been included in the Whitney and Sao Paulo Biennials as well as in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Saatchi Gallery, The Kitchen in New York, SculptureCenter in New York, the Power Plant in Toronto, among other venues.

Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art