A Bar at ... #5 (feat. a Bar, AM-painting, Pain Bottle, Man, Bruised Grid, Infiniti, Balls, Spectator)

Jutta Koether engages and challenges canonical male artists through a distinctive perspective that is at once decidedly irreverent, self-reflective, allegorical, and gendered. Always attentive to questions of staging and display, she has hung paintings from the ceiling or on floating glass panels, and she frequently experiments with lighting conditions. Her A Bar at . . . # reimagines Édouard Manet’s renowned Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882; Courtauld Gallery, London), in which a server stands behind a marble countertop, a long mirror in the background. She looks straight ahead; a man, possibly the subject of her pensive gaze, appears as a reflection behind her. In Koether’s reworking of this iconic painting, the subject is now naked, and the confrontation is directly with the viewer. The artist holds a mirror up to us—spectators implicated in the work’s content through our own act of looking.