Jutta Koether, neither painter nor German

It is the first retrospective that a Spanish museum dedicates to the artist Jutta Koether (Cologne, 1958). Curated by four hands beatriz herraez It is Catarina Lozano, black place unfolds through a concise set of works that cover, from 1987 to the present, thirty-five years of the career of an unclassifiable figure.

1987 is not a random starting point, but the last and only occasion on which Jutta Koether was invited to exhibit her work in Spain. Specifically in the collective that she, betina semmer It is Rosemarie Trockel They took place that year in Seville, at the La Máquina Española gallery, and at a time when, as mentioned Quico Rivas, “a German fraction of the nomadic army” was roaming the city. However, and although a year earlier Koether and the critic Diedrich Diederischsen they had written an article for the English magazine Artscribe that gave a vision of the Spanish artistic context, that the Iberian incursion did not last over time, like that of Trockel or Semmer.

We walk through a poorly lit, almost empty room, and so the exhibition begins. In the background, on a black mural, the lines of a metallic outline are cut out. It is, perhaps, the head of a woman that will appear again in other paintings that will greet us around the corner.

The artist has a multidisciplinary vision of art in which painting is the starting point

We end in one of the Artium's imposing spaces, crossed by two of its characteristic lattices, and with three glasses at the top that connect it to the square and filter into the interior much of the low light that mixes with the cold of autumn and the heat of some spotlights.

female figure poses a symbolic presence which manifests itself through her pictorial representations, but also metapictorial, due to the fact that it is she, a woman artist, who returns to the Offering to Venus which Rubens copied from Titian. It is the case that Touch and resist 5 (after Rubens copies Titian)a large canvas of colossal proportions that presides over the whole and spatially articulates this sober assembly that invites you to a leisurely stroll.

[Five women at the forefront of contemporary art]

Koether's, as widely commented in the text that Catarina Lozano wrote as a guide to black place, is not a path to use. Due to her vast experience as a critic for magazines such as artforum, Flash Art or the one mentioned above Artscribeadds a multidisciplinary vision of art that has painting as a starting point to approach presentations or concerts that, in the eyes of the spectator, they never take the expected direction.

In a conversation with Peio Aguirre in 2011, she herself admitted that she was “very used to performing or carrying out certain types of practice in the wrong place”. A procedure that, when going through this exhibition, becomes evident. “I tend to apply the same ethics of disrupting my own productions: things are erased, broken, lost, the paint is too thin or too thick, there are too many (or too few) pictorial effects, etc.”

transit through black place is somehow disconcerting and captivating. Jutta Koether is suddenly a German painter who seems to escape both assignments.

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