Editor’s Note: Notice the images are different? Well, the gallery or, ahem, galerie was unhappy with us using their images! Well, hey, asked and answered!

Most of the insults you might hurl at Jutta Koether’s paintings — sloppy, crude, unresolved — also constitute flattery. Her rough-hewn energy is never more apparent than in her early creations, often featuring garish figures rendered in smeared and crusty oils. In her current summer show at Galerie Buchholz, imaginatively titled 1982, 1983, 1984, we see affinities between Koether’s prose and paintings with their mutual obsessions for bleeding orifices and occult portals readily on display across the walls, accompanied by SPEX-related paraphernalia available for perusal on a backroom display table. The spikey spirit of the ’80s, when Koether flourished as an artist and writer for the aforementioned punk magazine, preceded her present-day “cool girl/it-woman” hype. 

This show recalls an era absent of the anxiety of influence, even as the work is made very much under the influence, and is impossible to disassociate from Koether’s social milieu of friends and lovers — the likes of Nico, Kim Gordon, and Tom Verlaine. (Unfortunately, there was no musical component to this show.) Martin Kippenberger, Frank Auerbach, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, and occult icon Marjorie Cameron have been invoked as precursors to Koether’s mystical mashups, though this micro retrospective seems to correspond aesthetically more with Asger Jorn’s figurative derangements of the CoBrA tradition. This is particularly evident in an untitled painting by Koether from 1983, picturing a Disquieting Duck-like creature with a bloody dot for an eye and an elongated bloodied neck that appears dislocated in anguish — an ecstatic open beak ready to receive a state of grace — or worms. The forsaken mangled critter serves as a timeless emblem of our gruesome past and grotesque present, where there’s no shortage of egregious gore behind those blurry sensitive content warnings. 

Indeed, most figures in Koether’s early work have been through some form of maiming. To articulate any further is to resort to nonsense. One untitled composition presents a shriveled bean alongside a black legless rabbit in silhouette, with recurring triangle and circle motifs foregrounding a finger-smeared mocha backdrop. Another presents a primary-yellow protrusion tilting upward against a deep indigo-blue background, while a spotty-faced shroom-demon below sprouts twigs. Another more figurative painting looks like a mother’s fleshy belly upside down with a slit and four little ghoulish heads attached at her side nearing her breasts. Abortion casualties or cesarean births? They look like you might not want to keep them around, in any case… 

Alchemical circles and watchful eyes dominate several compositions. “Max Ernst” contains a typically surreal Ernstian juxtaposition, an eye sitting atop a pyramid (a combination so ubiquitous it’s on the US dollar bill). In a painting titled “When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure” from 1983, a cluster of blotchy blood-red eyes pile on the viewer as a demonic collective, evocative of Sonic Youth’s track “The World Looks Red” from their debut album of the same year, Confusion Is Sex. A small painting bearing a bent orthodox cross on an egg exemplifies Koether’s tendency to summon her symbols through distortion and noise, as though their ancient forms and divine meanings are melting and morphing in the overbearing summer heat.

There’s nothing inherently profound about Koether’s prose or paintings, but there is something unsettling about her visions and associations, coupled with satisfyingly grimy textures and jubilant color collisions. Her black and white ink works on paper of femme figures cloaked in eyes and botanical life are sparsely illustrative and conceptually thin. In one ink work, apparent boobs hover at the top of the frame, though not as amusingly as that may sound, overall looking like a sketchy still life tossed off with minimal thought. In the later ‘80s, Koether produced more unabashedly referential paintings, including “Starry Night” iterations, a sort of humdrum gesture of art canon recursion that doesn’t seem to say much other than hey, here I am having a go at van Gogh…

With its modest scale and barely-there ambition, most of this early body of work contains enough surprisingly idiosyncratic elements to remain fresh and alive despite the sedate silence and white-walled presentation you expect from an Upper East Side address, an atmospheric mismatch that underscores a primal ferality. Not so long ago, Koether’s dear pal Kim Gordon was nearby this very gallery, shredding bird song in Central Park in a sparkly miniskirt, thrashing out tunes from her new album The Collective. The cool-it-idols of the art world (or, as Gordon would say, “industry of nothing”) are still a lot cooler than the rest of us, and still slotting seamlessly into our ever-grating world.

Jessica Almereyda is a writer based in New York.