The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents a solo exhibition devoted to André Butzer, which is retrospective and prospective alike. Coinciding with the artist’s 50th birthday in June 2023, it will feature a well-chosen selection of his most iconic works of the last two decades. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, it will bring together 22 paintings from 1999 to 2022 and reveal the full scope of Butzer’s experienced painterly horizon. Given the uncertain times we find ourselves in at present, the museum’s director Guillermo Solana is convinced that the exhibition will emphatically confirm Butzer’s belief that paintings are ‘localizations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope, which is why they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of’.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

The catalogue accompanying André Butzer’s solo exhibition Maikäfer, flieg!, on view at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen from 28 January to 19 March 2023, will be available for purchase on 27 January 2023. Published by Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, the catalogue includes an essay by Hannah Eckstein.

André Butzer has created the cover for the Italian magazine Corriere della Sera’s literary supplement, La Lettura, #578.

Including, among others, features by Julia Kristeva on Dostoevsky’s Demons, the defeat of Jean-Paul Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir or Albert Camus and a tongue-in-cheek compilation by Sofia Chiarini of 51 films based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, who was vocal about his disliking of the usual Christmas stories.

La Lettura #578

Three monumental paintings and four accompanying watercolors by André Butzer will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Friedrichshafen. The exhibition’s title references a famous German folk song which dates back to the 17th century. Throughout the centuries, writers and musicians alike have adopted the song to various ends — the latest being the atrocities of the Second World War, Paul Celan’ desperate, yet tiny sheaves of hope and a long past journey by the artist to the Polish seaside town of Kołobrzeg. Butzer’s repurposing reveals his on-going engagement with the troublesome German history.

Kunstverein Friedrichshafen

This new publication provides a compelling overview of exhibitions of André Butzer at Galerie Max Hetzler since his first with the gallery in 2003, charting his 17 solo and 10 group exhibitions in Berlin, Paris and London. Installation views and large-format illustrations of all exhibited works are accompanied by contemporary texts including reviews and catalogue essays.​ The book is now available for purchase on the Galerie Max Hetzler publications website. 

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This exhibition presents some 90 works on paper produced on a mostly intimate scale, with a variety of techniques, encompassing pencil, ink, gouache, and collage. Ranging from figuration to abstraction and spanning over 100 years, the diverse works included in this exhibition are nevertheless united by a deep engagement with form, surface, and line. 

Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst Augsburg

Work by André Butzer and Carroll Dunham is included in Mix & Match. Die Sammlung neu entdecken at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Celebrating the institution’s 20th anniversary, the exhibition presents some 350 works and series in a new display which spans 120 years of art history. Characterised by a spirit of curiosity and experimentation, the new hang invites visitors to rediscover  the collection in themed galleries and unconventional juxtapositions that transcend epochs, styles, and media. 

The exhibition remains on view until January 2024. 

Pinakothek

The new exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of André Butzer’s solo exhibition at the Friedrichs Foundation in Weidingen, which was on view from 7 May to 28 August 2022, can be ordered now. The catalogue is jointly published by Buchhandlung Walther König and Franz König Köln. 

Friedrichs Foundation

A new publication of André Butzer’s prints from 2001 until 2021 has been published by Edition Linn. This comprehensive catalogue spans from the artist’s simplest linocuts, to his elaborate series composed in a variety of graphic techniques, comprising the vibrant colours of recent years.

Edition Linn

Works by André Butzer, Grace Weaver and Günther Förg are included in the group exhibition dark things we tell each other, opening at the Miettinen Collection on Friday, 10 June 2022. Curated by Christian Malycha, this exhibition features selected works from the Miettinen Collection.

‘What do we tell ourselves? What do we tell each other? How do we speak at all? And what about? Memories and encounters? About impressions, feelings and emotions? Last week’s shoe shopping spree? Time unwilling to pass, yet never enough? Levantine cuisine, tan lines, fleeing and displacement? Mindful astrology apps, espresso martini, Spotify discoveries, incapacitation, balcony furniture? About pain, doubt and loss? Confidence and longing, joy?

In soliloquy, direct address and veiled dialogue, Paul Celan’s »dark things we tell each other« and Ingeborg Bachmann’s »I, alone by myself, am a dark story« make it seem possible that works of art bring an absolutely subjective experience of the world into a palpable and communicable form—perhaps void or obscure, mysterious or near unspeakable, but no less valid and an example of how to endure life’s abstrusity in this flawed world.

(Although, the distance on a sofa, from which you look at and talk past each other, at times is vaster than the tacit expanse between city and country side in the same night, in the same faded colors of 3AM.)

Bachmann’s and Celan’s story thus gave the impetus to ask how images enable such encounters. How individual experience »speaks« through images »into the open, where language can also lead to encounters.« What we tell ourselves, tell a ›you‹ or say together with them, hopes for resonance. In a trembling voice, self-assured or with borrowed words, every expression is a sort of relating-oneself-to-someone. Always unfamiliar, disconcerting, new. Sensuous and immediate: Who are you? Who am I? Wherefrom? Whereto? What’s one’s own, the other’s, the mutual?

In such encounters, one’s own world is given a hold and grounding for a few brief moments—be it understanding, recognition, bewilderment. All of a sudden, disparate and opposing times, places, bodies, inside and outside unite in a transient state of potentiality. Entangled and present. Until they separate again or almost inexplicably continue their shared tale.’

– Christian Malycha

For his exhibition at the Friedrichs Foundation, André Butzer placed four large paintings as well as eight watercolors from 2010 to 2021 in a thoughtfully related constellation. Along two mutually intertwined arcs, the gradual coming-into-their-own of his images becomes tangible, in which even the “figures were always abstract, already at the very beginning. They symbolized the path from an initially unknown end point to the actual beginning”. The simple togetherness of these four works gives a glimpse of the breadth and wholesomeness André Butzer’s painterly horizon of experience encompasses since 1994: A “future image of man, body, flesh and of potato chips”.

Friedrichs Foundation

Made in close collaboration with the artist, this unprecedented huge-format survey presents the future and origins of his painting according to André Butzer. From his early works of “Science Fiction Expressionism” that centered around a cast of figures at home both in space and in culturally occupied Europe, to his exploration of abstraction’s far limits in the seemingly black N-Paintings, Butzer emerges as an ever-inventive colorist who finds a new beginning in each work.

This is the first book first to span the full range of André Butzer’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2021, the works’ progression gaining an almost musical drive of development, return, and new beginnings. The plates are interspersed with contemporary quotes from the artist that illuminate his idiosyncratic stance as a background to the work, as well as photos from his archives. The introductory essay, written by Hans Werner Holzwarth, investigates the different work phases, and places the artist’s ideas in a wider discourse of abstraction and figuration after the end of either genre. And, most importantly, the book’s pristine, huge-format illustrations fully evidence the finesse as a colorist that place this artist among the internationally most recognized painters of his generation.

“Expressionism was about going back to nature and nakedness, about inner more than outer space. Now we can give this field a new task—to be informed by seriality, post-industrialism, and modern mankind’s artificiality. So I include organic and non-organic parts, fake nature and fake human. Titian said painting is about flesh and water, and I say it is about flesh and lemonade.”

— André Butzer

Get your copy here.

TASCHEN

André Butzer’s painting from 2004 is included in the group exhibition Unendliche Geschichten, on view at the Museum Ratingen until 31 July 2022. This exhibition presents works by 13 artists from the Oehmen collection.

Museum Ratingen

All good things come in threes and so do André Butzer’s collected writings. The third volume is elegantly sharp and poignant. Editor Alexander Linn continues to explore the unique fictitious universe, Butzer calls »NASAHEIM«. Boldly touching on the latter’s own work and biography, art history as well as music in numerous letters, in-depth conversations and poems. Guided by the simple question: What is real?, Butzer searches for »the actual location of painting, the space in-between. It’s a very esoteric but easy to understand conception of truth.«

Get your copy here.

Edition Linn

The second volume of André Butzer's collected writings has recently been published by Alexander Linn / Edition Linn. As an extension of the first volume, which focuses on the artist's writings from 1999 until 2017, this publication gathers an abundant selection of press releases, letters, conversations, texts and poems from 1994 until 2020, offering an intimate and personal insight into Butzer's painterly formation and practice.

Get your copy here.

This divertingly profound or profoundly diverting volume gathers an abundant selection of press releases, letters, interviews and conversations, prose, and poetry by painter André Butzer. Brought together for the first time, Butzer’s writings form a concise account of his artistic thinking.

Get your copy here.