 | Jutta Koether (D, USA)
Demons for Ladies, Gentlemen and Children
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Demons for Ladies, Gentlemen and Children, 2010
Multi-part installation Permanent and temporary tramway shelters, acrylic on canvas, various materials
Sales booth #15, Hauptplatz, side window, acrylic on canvas, various materials Tramway station “Südtiroler Platz” Hauptplatz, sales booth #15 “
100% painting”, “masses. painting and gatherings” – with such exhibition and book titles Jutta Koether has advocated the classical medium of easel painting, at a time when it was not yet undergoing a renaissance. Yet Koether’s paintings are rarely stand-alone, instead she usually creates and installs them with the audience in mind, be it by integrating them in performative or in specific architectural and spatial contexts. The attempt to dock herself as a person, the personal, and personal mythologies with the general is something that Jutta Koether pursues in her work.
Graz is the city in which Jutta Koether made her début as an artist at an exhibition at the local casino, and later with a solo exhibition at Galerie Bleich-Rossi. A city she frequently visited during the years of active exchange between the art scenes of Cologne and Graz. Similar to Martin Kippenberger – one of the protagonists of this connection – she is seeking for practises of interfering that go beyond painting, creating pictures that break away from the art context and expose themselves to a social sphere. This often leads to a crude language of form. Jutta Koether often finds her own materials for her pictures, for example “liquid glass,” a kind of epoxy resin with which she “casts” them on different support materials. She similarly “found” and appropriated the glass architecture of the “Südtirolerplatz” tram shelters and the sales booth on Hauptplatz. Or the cheap bijouterie that she bought locally and integrated into her picture. In an additionally installed shelter across to the existing “Südtirolerplatz” shelter, Jutta Koether cast a picture into one of the glass walls using “liquid glass.” The picture blocks, one might say, its sign-character Stopps and redirects, passersby outside the Kunsthaus. People waiting for a tram in the shelter automatically look towards the picture. It is hard to tell where the painting begins or ends. The overall ensemble, consisting of the three shelters and the tram in between, has become a unity that invites people to talk to “ladies, gentlemen and children.”
Commissioned by steirischer herbst
In co-operation with the Center for Social Research at the Karl-Franzens University Graz & Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) of Graz University of Technology
With thanks to Hans Kupelwieser
Project supporter Land Steiermark
Project sponsor Think!, Gebrüder Weiss & Alpenländische Schilderfabrik
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