The artist’s ode to New York is strangely empty, and that’s probably the point
Jutta Koether’s exhibition cycles nimbly through several leitmotifs. These include her signature cartoon faces, which materialise, spooked and hollow-eyed, from bogs of spermlike tildes in paintings on the gallery’s ground floor like Soulpack (2000) and International Community: 3 from the heart of the brain (1997). Upstairs: a strange metallic square appears on canvases and cardboard, at times as a painted icon (Homohomo 2, 2002), at times as a scratched-up, tacked-on scrap of foil (Metal Maniacs #2, 2008). Spots and chequerboard patterns abound in the thumbtack-studded, tropophobia-inducing glazed black canvas Untitled (2007); a selection of dotted works of ink on paper in a vitrine; and paintings like Special purpose Entities I (2002), whose design resembles a red-and-white-gridded picnic blanket. Koether’s works here date from the mid-1990s, following the artist’s move from Germany to New York, to 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, making the show a time capsule of artistic production in the city, in a slightly more affordable, less gentrified and less automated era.
Koether came up in the then-male-dominated post-Neo-Expressionist Cologne art scene of the 1980s, where she became known early on for red and black paintings of fleshy forms and garrulous gestural marks. Red still appears throughout the paintings and mixed-media works at Buchholz, albeit relegated to accents, stains and outlines. Black makes up a more sizeable portion of the palette: chalkboardlike surfaces are inscribed and smudged with silver and gold ink or used as ground for wilder hues, as in the mixed-media piece The Mystical Sublime Stuff (2001), which boasts an off-centre patch of powdered-sugar white framed in sour purple.
Koether is also known for performing literary, musical and reportedly cringeworthy acts on her opening nights – not the case for this show (there wasn’t even a reception). However, two paintings on the gallery’s third floor, the final works one likely encounters in the exhibition, seem to pay homage to the performative aspect of her practice. One of these, titled Madison Square Garden and dated circa 1943 – which, per the press release, Koether bought at the Chelsea Flea Market – depicts varicoloured spotlights shining down on dancers in an arena. In the other – Koether’s reinterpretation of the scene on a canvas nearly three times as large, titled Dance at Madison Square Garden (1995) – the figures are absent, the light is stronger, fields of pigment curdle into scribbles and perspective is thrown askew.
Besides a name on the checklist, Fay Ruffo, we are told nothing about the artist behind the flea-market find, who is, safe to say, a far cry from any known quantity such as Nicolas Poussin, the French Baroque painter whose oeuvre Koether would later riff on, or William Blake and Walter Benjamin – who are referenced in this show via two oil paintings, WB II (William Blake / He Felt the female and C’) (1997) and WB IV (Walter Benjamin) (1997). And although the idea of shared or ambiguous authorship crops up often in Koether’s practice – she was, for instance, one of the brains behind the collectively written New York artworld novel Reena Spaulings (2005) – this pair of paintings doesn’t quite have the spirit of a collaboratively conceived diptych. Ruffo seems to be for Koether neither a revered forebearer nor an active interlocutor – or, it would seem, much of a subject of journalistic intrigue – but a figure Koether is performing for and performing on: with her inflated and deskilled rendition of Madison Square Garden, Koether seems to say, ‘I can do it better (ie worse) than you’, and thus to foist on this obscure person, who is essentially lost to art history, the very question that haunted the (1980s German) milieu from which she decamped: why paint?
The duelling canvases hang on adjacent walls, Koether’s on the left, Ruffo’s on the right, just as when they were displayed together in Painting – the extended field, an exhibition during the 1990s that proposed that the medium could renew itself by shapeshifting and commingling with other disciplines. Thirty years on and this pairing reappears as if it had stayed intact, frozen in time, while the world changed around it. Speaking to art historian Benjamin Buchloh in 2016, Koether called painting, as it seemed to her when she arrived in New York, an ‘abandoned building’ in which she was squatting. Perhaps this mood accounts for the lack of people in her Madison Square Garden; perhaps today the same can be said for the city itself.
Jutta Koether: Songs of New York at Galerie Buchholz, New York, 8 September – 31 October
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.