Jutta Koether (*1958)

Jutta Koehter is one of the central figures in contemporary painting. Her work shows close references to pop-cultural themes, and is characterised by the engagement with feminism and gender politics. Her work also encompasses performance, film and music. Overall, her painting is intended as a feminist response to the Cologne scene of the late 1980s. She appears as a female counterpart to artists like Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. With her translucent colour fields, gestural brushstroke and drawings of female bodies, Koether often plays with the role of the female artist attributed to her, as in La Femme (Fantasy or What Do You Want from Me?). The naked woman is shown as a fantasy figure and object of desire, even though the gloomy depiction and the presentation without a frame also subvert the attractiveness of the motif. Koether sees the discourse of painting as a dramatized social field, and is thus always open to exaggerations and transformations.

The Cologne-born artist has lived and worked mainly in New York since 1992. The painting La Femme (Fantasy or What do you want from me?) (2006) was shown as part of Jutta Koether's solo exhibition Änderungen aller Art (2007) at the Kunsthalle Bern and was subsequently acquired.

Source: Work texts for the exhibition You never know the whole story in Kunstmuseum Bern, 2018 (Author: Kathleen Bühler); https://www.stiftungkunsthallebern.ch/de/sammlung-koether-a26-2.html