JUTTA KOETHER

I never looked at painting as some masterful thing one would want to reinstall, but instead as a platform, a potential, an island, a lifeboat, a discipline to negotiate life… a performance.

—Jutta Koether

Created during Jutta Koether’s early years in Cologne, Some Esoteric Sipping (1986) engages with the histories, contradictions, and pleasures of painting as a medium. During the 1980s, she sought alternatives to the standard narratives of modernism and to the then-dominant models of neo-expressionism, looking to esoteric and dissident modes like Surrealism, the landscape paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, and the late work of Philip Guston—“sipping” them, as the title of the present painting proposes. Here, images of cellular organisms, bodily interiors, and electronic circuitry evokes the work of Eva Hesse—the materiality of paint emphasized and presented as a metaphor for flesh.

JUTTA KOETHER
Some Esoteric Sipping
1986
Oil on canvas
15 3/4 x 11 13/16 inches (40 x 30 cm)
© Jutta Koether
Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein