Berlin Boogie #11, 2021

Acrylic on canvas (34 parts) and acrylic on wood panel (2 parts)

Although the German artist Jutta Koether is best known as a painter, she has referred to her work as “experimental expressionism”: an interdisciplinary practice that incorporates music, writing, and performance as well as visual art. The figure has remained at the heart of her work, as has her preference for the color red. Seriality is also a recurrent theme in Koether’s practice, articulated primarily through the grid. Berlin Boogie #11 is a prime example from a body of work with titles that specify the location of the studio in which each multipaneled piece was painted while also alluding to Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and its visual representation of the syncopated rhythms of boogie-woogie music. Koether has described these works as “bruised grids,” an acknowledgment of the fact that the interior squares are deliberately unevenly filled. Visibly hand-painted and intentionally pixelated, they are characterized by disruptions that undermine minimalistic strategies and reaffirm the artist’s touch.