Jutta Koether

I never looked at painting as some masterful thing one would want to reinstall, but instead as a platform, a potential, an island, a lifeboat, a discipline to negotiate life… a performance.

—Jutta Koether

Since the early 1980s, Jutta Koether has forged a painting practice that reckons with the medium’s histories, contradictions, and pleasures. Varying in dimension and shape, including an unusual hexagonal canvas, the four paintings that comprise Need You Everyday (Bluesed Grid Series, Flower Theme), 2020 are united by their palette and gridded compositions. Koether defined the gridded array of each painting with flatly painted brushstrokes of the same size over a black ground, creating a checkerboard pattern that resolves into an abstract image of a blue flower. The work is part of what the artist calls her Bluesed Grids, a verbal and conceptual play on her Bruised Grid paintings. When creating the Bluesed Grids, Koether moved away from the signature red palette that she used in the earlier series, maintaining a singular red square in each work’s center that acts as a visual counterpoint, animating the compositions. For Koether, painting has always been a performance, its making, exhibition, and circulation always durational and interpersonal. Thus, the cumulative, iterative aspect of her artistic practice is key, creating interconnections within and between her works.

Jutta Koether
Need You Everyday (Bluesed Grid Series, Flower Theme)
2020
Acrylic on canvas in four parts
Rectangular canvas: 51 3/16 x 31 1/2 inches (130 x 80 cm)
Two square canvases, each: 11 13/16 x 11 13/16 inches (30 x 30 cm)
Hexagonal canvas: 16 15/16 x 16 15/16 inches (43 x 43 cm)
© Jutta Koether
Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein