The Brooklyn Rail

The crisp and pervasive immediacy of oil paint occupies, for this reviewer, an impact oscillating between indulgent cliché and inchoate revelation. The works of Jutta Koether are no exception.

Known today for vibrant, faux-naif compositions, Koether has been a staple of New York exhibition schedules since the early aughts. Regular gallery goers have seen her progress through stages of representation and painterliness, with near-academic attention consistently paid to relationships of color and form. Those in the know may also have attended musical, cinematographic, and performative happenings staged by the artist. Now the same spectators can travel back in time, to her formative years: Koether’s current exhibition presents early works made between 1982 and 1984, during the nascent stages of her artistic journey. The exhibition includes a selection of small format paintings on canvas and paper, all made while Koether lived and worked in Cologne, Germany and wrote for the counter-cultural music magazine, SPEX.

Viewing the early works of a mid-career artist presents a particular challenge. One wonders whether Koether’s early paintings should be evaluated as standalone pieces from a young German artist of the 1980s, or through the lens of her established legacy in the mind’s eye. This causes an inherent tension. Mostly dominated by central, semi-representational subjects, the works abound with recurrent motifs that have persisted throughout Koether’s career, as well as simple compositional structures that are refreshingly new.

In one particularly beautiful untitled painting on paper from 1983, delicate foregrounded shades of yellow, pink, and gray give way to a black triangle, surprisingly subtle in effect despite its corners nearly spanning all edges of the piece. Stripped of art historical references and artifice, this commanding background shape both dictates the movement of Koether’s brushstrokes around it and aspires to a rough outline of facial features within. Far from overpowering the small sheet though, it somehow yields attention to the exquisite details dancing along its peripheries: a stutter in impasto at the lower left corner, effortless rays of warmth along the top. Soft pats of red glowing from behind broad strokes of pinkish-gray, a bone structure so familiar to Koether’s later works, are here still tender, seared into the composition like fresh wounds.

As is to be expected with the work of a young artist, there are also misses. Such is the case with an untitled charcoal and ink drawing from 1982, just next to the aforementioned painting. In this case the left side of a face comes into focus from a series of charcoal squiggles applied in hurried gestures and shaded by pools of ink wash. Diluted rather than softened, the work is executed in a manner one might expect more from graphite pencil than from media known for its potential to imbue rich and varied dimensionalities to form. In later life Koether learned to masterfully exploit awkward spatial and media-based relationships in her paintings. But in 1982 the young artist was clearly still grappling with compositional balance, the resulting work a contrivance at best.

With their tight color usage and sculptural compositions, Koether’s early works offer a glimpse into her style during a time when she was forming the basis of her practice not only in painting, but also in writing and music. The world the young artist evoked eschews representational light and shadow, opting rather for exaltations of plasticity verging on the fauvist. Here, interdisciplinarity can be felt as a certain rhythm and vibrance, a dance that emanates from the works themselves. Shapes and symbols are employed neither formally nor iconographically, more like they have accidentally fallen into the artist’s atmospheric milieu than brandished in pursuit of any one cultural articulation. Bereft of narrative force and straightforward in subject matter, these paintings are a compelling starting point for the increasingly complex compositional spaces she has continued to mine for the last four decades.

In short, many of the works do feel like a foreshadowing of Koether’s later practice, if only a posteriori. Perhaps more important is the great majority that hold their own at remove from the light of her legacy.