A capricious elusiveness is an essential characteristic of the art of Jutta Koether. Black as night at one moment, shining with joy the next, she offers an oeuvre that appears to consist purely of side-paths. A profesional artistry that attests to great insight and virtuosity is alternated with the muddiest painting in the world: anit-art, anit-beauty, anti-everything. Who is she, and what does she want?
In the 1980s Rosmarie Trockel (1952) was viewed as an outspoken feminist whose work seemingly demonstrated her disdain for the macho art world of that time. It has become clear since then that Trockel’s work is anything but evidently political or obviously feminist. Trockels’s work may be qualified as emancipatory, but in philosophical rather than political terms.
