Jutta Koether | 100% (Portrait Robert Johnson)
100% (Portrait Robert Johnson)
1990
Oil on canvas
Diptych, each panel
59 1/16 x 27 1/2 inches (150 x 70 cm)
© Jutta Koether
Since the early 1980s, Jutta Koether has forged a painting practice that reckons with the medium’s histories, contradictions, and pleasures. Using and reusing a range of motifs and materials, she cultivates the medium’s essential strangeness: its ability, despite its myriad determinations, to yield something unanticipated and vital, something affective and dissonant. In 1987, she adopted the formal and conceptual constraint of painting predominantly in red, a color that might evoke desire, abjection, pain, anger, or femininity. A litany of nouns and descriptors—“obsessed,” “painted,” “electric,” “spiritual,” “paranoia,” “hypostatic,” “skies,” “astral,” “aura,” “machine”—traverse the right panel of her 1990 diptych, 100% (Portrait of Robert Johnson). Taking the enigmatic blues musician as its namesake, the painting renders these words in vivid, visceral crimson and burgundy, creating a suggestive and exuberant image that sits incongruously beside the left panel, which features a spectral face surrounded by pearls. When Koether painted this work, there was no known image of Johnson—who, according to legend, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his music. Here, text and gesture converge to reflect Johnson’s mythical proportions.