Image: Kunst Museum Winterthur | Reinhart am Stadtgarten
Kunst Museum Winterthur will present Jutta Koether’s ‘Charm’ at Villa Flora from 12 September 2026 to 17 January 2027. The exhibition will focus on early French modernism, a tradition appreciated and collected at Villa Flora by Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser after the turn of the century.
The subject arrives in Winterthur with an artist whose painting has persistently addressed the canon’s exclusions. Koether’s oeuvre was described as a large-scale attempt to “create a counternarrative to the canon of modern painting” in the Museum Brandhorst exhibition ‘Tour de Madame’ in Munich. Konrad Bitterli curates the Villa Flora presentation.
Born in Cologne in 1958 and now based in New York and Berlin, Koether began painting in the 1980s among Cologne’s Neoexpressionist artists. That period saw a broader return to painting after years of Conceptualism, through movements including the Neue Wilde and Transavanguardia. The field, as Villa Flora’s account notes, was largely dominated by men who often embraced the trope of the painter.
Koether developed a painterly practice distinct from that immediate, violent approach. Her work brings together gestural brushstrokes, depictions of the female body, and lyrical appropriations of poetry and art history with pop-cultural elements. After moving to New York, she expanded her engagement with punk and noise culture, adopting motifs from fellow women artists while challenging the male-dominated canon of art history.
Her work also extends across performance and music. Koether is an editor and publisher of the magazine SPEX, and has written reviews for journals including Texte zur Kunst. Her oeuvre has previously been shown at Kunsthalle Bern in 2007, Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2011, and Museum Brandhorst in Munich in 2018.
