VITORIA-GASTEIZ.- Artium Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country is presenting the exhibition Iván Zulueta’s Rapture dealing with the world of this Basque filmmaker and his constant experimentation with images.
The museum opened the first exhibition in Spain of the artist Jutta Koether, Black Place, on 28 October, displaying works spanning more than three decades of her production.
This programme of exhibitions and activities is part of the museum’s 20th anniversary celebrations.
Artium Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, presents its programme of exhibitions for the second part of its period celebrating the 20th anniversary of the opening of this institution. The programme for the second half of 2022 begins with the exhibition Iván Zulueta’s Rapture, which deals with the figure and work of this Basque filmmaker (1943-2009). The exhibition explores the universe that he created through his ceaseless experimentation with images based on a selection of titles from his filmography, his work as a graphic artist, a number of interviews with people with whom he was associated, and even memorabilia. The exhibition will open on 14 October.
On 28 October, the opening of the exhibition Jutta Koether. Black Place took place. This is the artist’s first monographic exhibition in Spain and it includes pieces spanning more than three decades of her production, intersected by her interest in painting as a medium to develop a feminist practice. The exhibition at Artium Museum brings together works using different formats and materialities, ranging from large canvases that act as re-appropriations of works by classical artists to medium and small format works on various formats in which Koether often applies other materials, thereby exceeding the limits of traditional painting.
Iván Zulueta’s Rapture
From 14 October 2022 to 5 March 2023
Curator: Xabier Arakistain
This exhibition deals with the figure and work of the Basque filmmaker Iván Zulueta (1943-2009). It explores the universe that he created through his ceaseless experimentation with images based on a selection of titles from his filmography, his work as a graphic artist, a number of interviews with people with whom he was associated, and even memorabilia. Zulueta explored the limits of film by using methods akin to painting and drawing in order to consider images, decipher their enigma and delve into their ability to abduct viewers. Cinema was therefore for him a pause in real life, a space, a medium for dreaming and thinking. “Pausing is the Achilles heel, the vanishing point, our only chance,” he makes one of his characters say.
Moreover, cinema per se, which like any passion can even devour its sufferer as a vampire devours its victim, was one of the major themes of his short filmography. In this passion, he extended the possibilities of the medium as an instrument for artificially capturing a moment or an experience, to the point of literally disembowelling cinema frame by frame. He developed his experimental creative process by intensely interacting with artistic or musical movements, such as pop, glam and punk.
In fact, Zulueta was at the same time one of the first ambassadors of these British movements and a leading figure in developing so-called “underground culture” or “counterculture” in San Sebastian and Madrid during the 1960s and 1970s. A counterculture that has been defined as “that indecipherable force capable of creating an alternative future that never occurred” and whose very idea concluded in the 1980s with AIDS and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Jutta Koether. Black Place
From 28 October 2022 to 16 April 2023
Curators: Beatriz Herráez and Catalina Lozano
Black Place is Jutta Koether’s first monographic exhibition in Spain, bringing together works spanning more than three decades of her production. Ever since the early 1980s, Koether has been developing an artistic practice grounded in painting and intersected by writing, performance and music, practices that serve to make her undisciplined when it comes to art historiography and seeking her own genealogies. Koether’s work approaches the history of painting in a stealthy, disobedient manner, reclaiming the medium as place for an artistic practice that is informed by feminism.
Black Place brings together works in a variety of formats and materialities, from large-scale canvases acting as re-appropriations of works by artists such as Poussin, Rubens or Cezanne – made on the ground in a manner almost akin to performance in places where they were initially exhibited with a sense of immediacy in their making – to medium and small format works on various formats in which Koether often applies other materials, thereby exceeding the limits of traditional painting. Although Koether’s work has always featured the history of painting as a subject, her strategies of appropriation have varied, as has the way in which text is introduced into her work. Her focus on various expressions of popular culture is obvious from her earliest works, as well as on other issues related to history and the very logic with which she constructs painting.
Jutta Koether was born in Cologne in 1958. She studied art and philosophy at the University of Cologne and also completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in the early 1980s. Museums and institutions such as Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Mudam Luxembourg, PRAXES Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Kunsthalle in Bern, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, among others, have dedicated monographic exhibitions to her work.
In addition to her work as an artist, Koether has written for art and music publications such as Spex, Eau de Cologne, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst and Flash Art, and she is the author of several books, including f. (1987). Koether has also collaborated on various projects with the Reena Spaulings collective and with Rita Ackerman, Tony Conrad, Kim Gordon, John Miller, Steven Parrino and Tom Verlaine, among others, in her musical performances. She has been Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg since 2010.
