Jutta Koether

The Museum Brandhorst in Munich announced its comprehensive solo exhibition *Tour de Madame* as a large-scale attempt by Jutta Koether to “create a counter-history to the canon of modern painting.” Indeed, the artist—born in Cologne in 1958 and now splitting her time between New York and Berlin—has had a significant impact on the cultural landscape since the 1980s, not only as a painter, performer, and musician, but also as an editor and publisher of the magazine *SPEX* and as the author of countless reviews, including for the journal *Texte zur Kunst*.

Her career as a painter began in the 1980s within the neo-expressive art scene in Cologne. Under the banner “The Hunger for Images,” a worldwide return to painting took place after years of conceptual art, under terms such as “New Wild Painting” or “Transavantgarde.” Like painting as a whole, this movement was predominantly shaped by male artists, who often embraced the cliché of the painter to the fullest. Jutta Koether countered this immediate, forceful approach to painting with a multifaceted body of work: gestural brushstrokes and depictions of female bodies, as well as a lyrical appropriation of poetry and art history, were combined in her work with elements of popular culture. Upon moving to New York, she expanded this body of work to include motifs from punk and noise culture. In doing so, she challenged the male-dominated canon of art history and drew upon motifs created by female artists.

Jutta Koether’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in recent years, including at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2007, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2011, and the Museum Brandhorst in Munich in 2018. At Villa Flora, Jutta Koether will focus on early French Modernism, which was appreciated and collected there by Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser after the turn of the century.

Curated by Konrad Bitterli

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Jutta Koether