André Butzer
(Born 1973)
Most distinctively, André Butzer (Born 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany) has created an intriguing fusion of early European Expressionism with ready-made American pop culture. Throughout his 30-year career, the conceptual recurrence and apparent seriality of his figures as well as his insistence on the bare human dignity are testament to his courageous and continuous enquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.
As emblems of human existence, his iconic characters embody the recurring extremes of history; the childlike Friedens-Siemens is vision itself, beholding the past and future with eyes wide open, as if to witness the industrial ruin and envision a utopian peaceful existence alike. The Wanderer homelessly roams the earth. Longing for a place of his own, he is both witness and perpetrator of man-made devastation and horror. As a later descendant of Friedrich Hölderlin’s fateful Hyperion, he could be an alter ego or even a self-portrait of the artist—and then again, not at all. On the brink of this world and the beyond, the figure of the Woman resides in a tense state of vulnerable powerlessness and rigorous capability. Modest and benevolent, she could even be an icon of the Virgin Mary, reuniting what is present and what is absent.
When all of them come together, figures and colors combine to form a large animated trait, a motif that encompasses the entire image, creating spatiality and, at the same time, being a pure planar ornament. Butzer takes back the representational aspect in relation to the decorative character of his figures. On dense and tightly woven surfaces, he grants all manner of things the same pictorial values. From the elementary relation of the horizontal and the vertical, Butzer has created a pictorial figure that inevitably reveals the finiteness as well as the possibilities of Being in his so-called N-Paintings (2010–2017). In the tremendous condition of imageless immediacy, each of them is unique, unrepeatable and individual, constantly questioning our wavering stand in the world.
After having explored the fundamental dimensions of color and the potentiality of painterly expression in the seemingly utter black of his N-Paintings, Butzer relocated to California (2018-2021). Painting outdoors year-round, the following works brim with a vibrating freshness and display his mature, painterly mastery. This “American experience” confirmed Butzer’s belief that paintings are “localizations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope,” which is exactly why “they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of.”
Yet, Butzer’s paintings reach far beyond the bare figures. Instead of mere colorfulness, he brings the images to a coherent wholeness or coloristic totality. Every boundary is equally a crossing. Each color he places is not isolated but continuously related to the whole of the colored plane. Each new painting realizes the unity of these opposites and contrasts. This relational Being of color reveals itself as the planar-ornamental origin of all appearances, as the coloristic and historical heritage of Butzer’s paintings is neither merely figurative nor merely abstract, but complete Beings of the unison and presence of color.
Having first exhibited with Skarstedt for their New York City inauguration in 2007, André Butzer returned to Skarstedt with a self-titled solo exhibition in Febraury 2025 at Skarstedt Chelsea.