Jutta Koether is a German artist who incorporates music, writing,
and performance into her abstract paintings. She is heavily inspired by
punk music, specifically Patti Smith
Koether’s abstract work utilizes web-like patterns to connect various
geometric shapes and abstracted figures in her work. “I totally
‘abandoned’ the German cultural sphere,” she said of her career, “… and
developed a kind of structural sense of disobedience for avoiding the
ruts of the patriarchal models still dominant in schools, in the art
world, even in activism.” The artist was born in 1958 in Cologne,
Germany, she later studied critical theory with Jacques Lacan in Paris. A
former editor of the music and culture magazine Spex, she aimed
to showcase up-and-coming artists during the 1990s. During this time,
Koether began making paintings inspired by artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, as seen in her work, Mède
(1992). The artist has been featured at Bortolami Gallery and the 2012
Whitney Biennial. She currently lives and works between New York, NY and
Berlin, Germany. Today, her works are held in the collections of The
Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, and the Nationalgalerie Berlin, among others.