After the recent solo shows at the Kunsthalle Bern (2007) and the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2006), Jutta Koether is going to present a new project for the Bergen Kusthall in Norway.
For this show, Koether will continue to pursue her practice which sits between painting, music and performance, playing with a set of common grounds for all these media, especially painting, which in Germany – particularly in Cologne, where the artist was born in 1958 – is generally linked to male figures like Martin Kippenberger and Sigmar Polke. Her oeuvres are dense with references taken from literature, low culture and art history, underlining Koether’s literary bravura, which is also confirmed by her several essays on art and music published in Flash Art, SPEX, Texte zur Kunst and Artforum.
Another topical aspect of Koether’s modus operandi is collaboration: in the past years she made several projects and performances with musician Kim Gordon and Tom Verlaine, artists Steven Parrino (with whom she played in the band Electrophilia) Ei Arakawa and Reena Spaulings co-director Emily Sundblad. Her last performance was staged at Friedrich Petzel gallery together with artist Mike Kelley, musician and filmmaker Tony Conrad and John Miller, whose works gold leaf – displayed during the live set – became the main source of Koether’s costume.
Meanwhile, the most important of Koether’s collaborative projects, the Bernadette Corporation (which includes Reena Spaulings co-director John Kelsey among others) will present a show entitled “Josef Strau,” taking as a starting point the ‘ad-like poem’ Fendi Life Essence, written by Strau, a Berlin-based artist born in Vienna in 1957. The show is due to open on January 25 at the Zurich Kunsthalle.
