Berlin Boogie #11

Seriality is a recurrent theme in Koether’s practice, articulated primarily through the grid. This motif first appeared in her work in December 2000, when she embarked on a project to create
a drawing every day for a year. Using sheets of graph paper and colored pencils, Koether filled each square to create checkerboard compositions. Through variations in the direction of strokes and intensity of hues, the drawings reflect the artist’s changing mood and the passage of time. After this exercise, Koether began a new body of multipanel works—of which Berlin Boogie #11 is an example—characterized by gridded patterns in her signature color. Each panel, she has explained, is “covered in grids painted in various tones of red, coming together in an expansive triangular form, like wings, like cleaning the palette [sic].”6 Although these works were initially conceived as an “abstract counterpoint to a very strongly figurative oeuvre,” the artist has continued to make them in a diaristic way.7 Their titles specify the location of the studio in which they were created while also alluding to the painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and its visual representation of the syncopated rhythms of boogie-woogie music.