A Conversation with Jutta Koether
“There is a certain radically in your painterly execution that interests me, Your work is unlike Kippenberger’s, for example: His attempts at dislodging Richter are very easy to follow, his dialogue with Polke is easy to follow, in his work there is always a jocular dialogue, in many ways, in many structures, in many textures. One can almost always say, Oh, now he’s looking at this and he’s coming out of this and he’s trying to deal with this.” (Buchloch, 29)
“The Seasons are actually fairly controlled. I studied the original paintings at the Louvre very carefully. The compositional field is pretty much built in the same way, down to the centimeter. Only I tried to reverse the ratio, so that instead of having, say, 90 percent pictorial structure combined with these minor emotional inserts making up only 5 percent, almost like particles, it was the other way around. So there you have a fixed structure. And then there are these other additional, ridiculous structures, pseudo-structures that I invented . . . so the composition is set. The figures in the paintings were kept, but I made them much bigger in scale, and so on. The color scheme is the same as in the originals, but amplified. For instance, Poussin’s Winter has darkened enormously. It was always dark—winter is not depicted as a happy, snowy landscape but as a deluge, the apocalyptic dark night of the storm— and I rendered it with this weird black wheel in the middle of the painting, spilling out from or cracking the surface of the painting. (Koether, 31)