Conversation | Jutta Koether and Dr Nicholas Cullinan
Jutta Koether with Nicholas Cullinan
Lévy Gorvy London
Tuesday 14 December 2021
Nicholas Cullinan: Jutta, it’s great to be here with you today, in your exhibition, which is fantastic. I am very excited to talk to you about these works as someone who has admired your practice for many years. I want to begin by asking you about the title of the exhibition, which is obviously very specific and relates to a series of works included. Could you tell me a little bit more about the title and where it comes from?
Jutta Koether: Yes, of course. The phrase is appropriated from a text by TJ Clark, who uses it in relation to Poussin’s The Marriage, one of the Seven Sacraments paintings. “Femme Colonne” relates specifically, in TJ Clark’s reading, to a figure in the painting that is a composite of two bulks of cloth piled on top of each other, forming something that we could associate with a human figure—and potentially a female, as it seems like a gown—leaning or standing by a column. The column and this figure merge in a very intense way, and they become a point from which you can enter the painting. As a figure that is ‘other’, it makes it possible to enter a world that is otherwise not readable for us, like the one operating within Poussin’s painting, which uses codes from the ancient Roman world…
NC: … mythological, historical, or religious…
JK: …it is already a mash-up, a kind of layered and filtered presentation that TJ Clark is entering. I also found it interesting, the term “femme-colonne,” because it is so simple: it just describes what the figure is. Personally, within my own history, I could relate it to previous works, and one series in particular called Sovereign Women in Painting, which are artificiliazed portraits of standing women, mostly singers. I applied the elements [of the “femme-colonne”] very, very directly in the big painting that is in the Albemarle gallery space, 4 Women, which depicts myself and three friends that are, for me, existentially foundational figures. I consider them columns that hold the space, but also viewpoints for which I am able to create work. It’s kind of a way to enter…
NC: …into painting?
JK: Into painting on one’s own terms.
NC: And painting both then and now?
JK: Yes. And to find a method that does not just appropriate or quote, take or steal (all these procedures that have helped artists over time to dig up or reimport information from other places), but that alter those methods and add something, or use them in a way that is very personal: not just a generic way of doing something.
NC: Each artist in their own generation might reinvent another artist and bring them into their age anew. In the case of Poussin, obviously, you have Cézanne in the 19th century, and in the 20th century, you have people like Cy Twombly. But even viewers have to make these artists relevant to themselves in their time, so everything is always being revivified. It’s not just quotation. It is actually bringing things back into the present.
JK: Yes, and that makes it a more living component. I don’t equate paintings with living creatures but I think there is a sort of intimacy possible. I think that always has been a driving idea in my work, and I think what I try to do with specific ensembles or “rooms” is to create proposals: negotiating that moment within the space. These works were definitely not made for this room, and yet when asked to think about creating an exhibition, I tried to make a situation by playing with the spaces. And also, make decidedly two different “space feelings”.
NC: And obviously the works are very varied, spanning both abstraction and figuration, to put them into two crude camps. But I think we should be more granular than that. They were all made during lockdown, which is something we have all been experiencing. Many of these works contain strands that you’ve been thinking about for many years. Were they inflected by the experience of lockdown or did it just give you time to focus on painting and what you wanted to paint?
JK: I guess I was not alone with this. I talked about it especially with other painters, who actually had an interesting time in the studio, being somewhat released from other duties and tasks. It allowed a growth. There were no deadlines, so you really had to confront the number of hours you wanted to spend with a work. How often do you want to return to it? I live and work in the same space and you are there with [the work], so there was a heightened sense of close quarters and intensity. It allowed for more scrutiny and for more layers, to release some tension and transform it into something I hadn’t done in a long time: an opening up of my palette, which is mostly rooted in red tones, to let in others…
NC: The richness of the surface and the paint is very extraordinary. I want to ask you now about the two different bodies of work in the exhibition: the Femme Colonne series that we have talked about and the two paintings that relate to Lucian Freud, based on Lying by the Rags and Standing by the Rags, painted by Freud in the late ‘90s. The point I want to make in regard to these two bodies of work in the exhibition is an interest or insistence on verticality, especially with the Femme Colonne paintings. They are very exaggeratedly vertical, beautiful compositions and I wanted to ask you about them because the idea of the verticals and the horizontals seems very interesting to me. Is this something you were already thinking about or did it come to the fore in the exhibition?
JK: The “uprightness”—that’s also how TJ Clark describes it—has always been a part of my vocabulary. The idea of verticality as a symbol for the phallic world, and horizontality for the female world, was an issue. How much of that is true? How much can I alter it? Where do I fit in? Each presentation seems to be a kind of resetting or rethinking of that. I don’t think Freud ever theorised works in any way, but I thought it was really interesting the way the upright nude in Standing by the Rags can’t really exist in that way, unless it is an extreme pose, like when you do life drawing. The way it was painted was very interesting to me: the way it seems to both stand and collapse, or stand and decay at the same time. I saw all of these mixed messages and this massive ambivalence, for example in the flesh being really hard and weird and crusty, but also totally dissolving. What is conveyed in terms of human matter is very interesting to me, and I think painting is a site in general where these types of emotions can still be expressed or made felt. My deep interest in Freud, in a whole group of painters active in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including Twombly, has a lot to do with the attempt, conscious or not, to negotiate a possibility of making the “human” possible again after the trauma of the holocaust and the wars of the 20th century—after the destruction of humanity and its values.
NC: It is also important to say that they are not just paintings after, whether it is Cézanne, or Poussin or Twombly, or Freud. The way that you refer to them in terms of your particular use of color —the red palette—and even in the way that you paint, where you leave the canvas visible beneath, is very particular. You are translating them into a much more contemporary moment, I think.
JK: I would hope so! I also think, of course, that I would like them to speak to my time and to my moment. That’s why I import. I have played a lot in my history of painting: with the concept of novelty, with layers of paints that did not exist when Cézanne painted, such as metallic paints and interference paints, and all the special things new technologies allow.
NC: The paintings in the exhibition, as your work has always done, oscillate between figuration and abstraction, which I touched upon before. They are crude categories, but they are present amongst us. I wanted to ask you particularly about Berlin Boogie, which is on the wall behind you, and whether this body of work is abstract or figurative. Is it something that you think about actively when you are choosing your sources? The idea for the Femme Colonne series, for example, came from an essay by TJ Clark and generated an extraordinary series of works. In general, do you think about the difference between abstraction and figuration or are they just containers for your preoccupations and thoughts?
JK: Well, I don’t think that any of the Boogies are really abstract. I always title them after the location they were made in, and the way they are configured is highly specific to [where they are exhibited]. I made eleven of them, and this is the first time they actually hang like this. Usually they hang in a triangle. They started as a sort of palette, an abstract counterpoint to a very strongly figurative oeuvre. The first one I did, I showed in Zürich in 2014 or 2013. Then I have continued to do them in a kind of diaristic way. They accumulate, and I name them after the studio in which they were done. There are Berlin Boogies, there are Brooklyn Boogies, because I was in a studio in Brooklyn, and there are Manhattan Boogies.
NC: Do they reference Mondrian as well?
JK: Yes, of course. And the other name for these compositions, as evidence that they are not abstract, really, is bruised grids: ‘bruised’ in so far as the grids are not finely filled…
NC: They are visibly hand-painted.
JK: Yes, and there’s always a layer on top of them to erase them, or to make them awkward, or to disturb them. So there is this idea of doing something, improvising out of something that is not perfect, that instead has the power of being self-generative. The idea is then to make the self-generative aspect much more forceful, even if something that generates itself also makes mistakes, produces glitches, or it includes in a way the acceptance of this other…
NC: Element of chance?
JK: The element of chance, the possibility of mishaps, imperfections … like the human. I think that is important to me. It also represents my refusal to not [sic] do digital painting, in a way. I use a phone as everybody else, so it is not out of a kind of nostalgia. It is much more about this very direct…
NC: It’s putting the human touch back in.
JK: The touch, yes! It’s my hand. Like I said, there is never an assistant there. It is just me with this idea…
NC: They are pixels, but they are obviously hand-painted. I was thinking of the Hand-Painted Pop exhibition from the early ‘90s.[1] It reminds me of that. All of your work is gestural in a sense, it is about the human touch and bringing that back to the experience of painting and looking.
JK: Yes.
NC: Jutta, I think we have to finish here but I wanted to thank you for this fantastic conversation and the wonderful exhibition. Thank you.
JK: Thanks so much.
[1] Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–62. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, December 1992—March 1993. An examination of American art during the years between the era of the New York school of painting and the rise of Pop Art from different perspectives. The exhibition featured artists including Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
