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 the Cologne scene of the late 1980s. 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 Kunstverein. She connects her various forms of expression with one another, thus creating experimental arrangements from which a flowing dynamic and openness develop.
An extensive catalogue is published for the exhibition by the publishing house DuMont. 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.

Biography Jutta Koether, born in 1958 in Cologne. Lives and works in New York. Exhibitions and projects (selected): Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2006); Whitney Biennial, New York (2006); Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2005); Simultanhalle, Köln (2005); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln (2004); Galerie Meerettich, Berlin (2004); P.S.1, New York (2004); Swiss Institute, New York (2002); Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln (2002); Galerie Freund, Wien (2000); Pat Hearn Gallery, New York (1999); INIT-Kunsthalle, Berlin (1999)