André Butzer
06 Sep - 11 Oct 2008
ANDRÉ BUTZER
06th September - 11th October 2008
Born in 1973, André Butzer is a member of those internationally well-known artists of his generation who exclusively use painting as the artistic medium.
Since the end of the 1990’s, Butzer puts on the stage his own mass culture by using a set of figure-types and characters as protagonists of his work series. After having put them on canvas with impulsive brush-strokes and by means of an expressive application of forms and colours, his grotesque beings, with their saucer eyes and feet, refer only partially to their models –i.e. that of Walt Disney comics and national socialist emblems. His work is about Friedense-Siemense, H-Menschen and Schande-Menschen, who live in the fictional places „Annaheim“ (Deutschkalifornien; on the basis of Disneyland in Anaheim) and Nasaheim (outer space). The political and sociological dimensions, with their innumerable allusions to linguistic creations, are unambiguous: from Disneyland to Siemens, as signs of both the American entertainment industry and the German economical power, the characters are unambiguously marked by emblems of consumption and economy, cultural industry, social hierarchy and history.
In his 3rd solo exhibition at Galerie Bernd Kugler, André Butzer presents five new, large-sized oil paintings. Next to two unmistakable works of blond female figures from the already known kosmos, the artist shows an abstract work series which takes one by surprise if one recalls the monochrome paintings shown in 2006 at Galerie Bernd Kugler. At that time, the bucolic world with its characters dissolved into a dark, strangely-structured colour mass, but now the painting superficis has lifted. Colourful lines are drawn --passing by leaked, thinned-out colour, blots and traces-- and the impasto-applied mountains in painted grey hues become clews of lines, geometrical forms or cable-like structures.
In the juxtaposition of the works, his exhibition shows that the new step away from figurative paintings towards abstraction is only an alleged disruption, which neither ruptures nor questions the artist’s œuvre. With the abdication of his characters, André Butzer displaces the accent on the stressed presence of painting and points out that he is rather concerned with questions related to the inner structure of painting itself. Thus, the strict distinction between the figurative and the abstract seems obsolete and is not relevant to the actual root of the matter for –so Butzer— „[...] without the serially thought world of figures, which resists the real serial world, no abstract painting would have emerged. The so-called abstract and the so-called figurative works have only become possible for me, because they know of each other and justify each other.“ And as though this justification must be backed up, somewhere, one of the familiar faces emerges out of the tangle of lines.
Claudia Mark
06th September - 11th October 2008
Born in 1973, André Butzer is a member of those internationally well-known artists of his generation who exclusively use painting as the artistic medium.
Since the end of the 1990’s, Butzer puts on the stage his own mass culture by using a set of figure-types and characters as protagonists of his work series. After having put them on canvas with impulsive brush-strokes and by means of an expressive application of forms and colours, his grotesque beings, with their saucer eyes and feet, refer only partially to their models –i.e. that of Walt Disney comics and national socialist emblems. His work is about Friedense-Siemense, H-Menschen and Schande-Menschen, who live in the fictional places „Annaheim“ (Deutschkalifornien; on the basis of Disneyland in Anaheim) and Nasaheim (outer space). The political and sociological dimensions, with their innumerable allusions to linguistic creations, are unambiguous: from Disneyland to Siemens, as signs of both the American entertainment industry and the German economical power, the characters are unambiguously marked by emblems of consumption and economy, cultural industry, social hierarchy and history.
In his 3rd solo exhibition at Galerie Bernd Kugler, André Butzer presents five new, large-sized oil paintings. Next to two unmistakable works of blond female figures from the already known kosmos, the artist shows an abstract work series which takes one by surprise if one recalls the monochrome paintings shown in 2006 at Galerie Bernd Kugler. At that time, the bucolic world with its characters dissolved into a dark, strangely-structured colour mass, but now the painting superficis has lifted. Colourful lines are drawn --passing by leaked, thinned-out colour, blots and traces-- and the impasto-applied mountains in painted grey hues become clews of lines, geometrical forms or cable-like structures.
In the juxtaposition of the works, his exhibition shows that the new step away from figurative paintings towards abstraction is only an alleged disruption, which neither ruptures nor questions the artist’s œuvre. With the abdication of his characters, André Butzer displaces the accent on the stressed presence of painting and points out that he is rather concerned with questions related to the inner structure of painting itself. Thus, the strict distinction between the figurative and the abstract seems obsolete and is not relevant to the actual root of the matter for –so Butzer— „[...] without the serially thought world of figures, which resists the real serial world, no abstract painting would have emerged. The so-called abstract and the so-called figurative works have only become possible for me, because they know of each other and justify each other.“ And as though this justification must be backed up, somewhere, one of the familiar faces emerges out of the tangle of lines.
Claudia Mark