ANDRÉ BUTZER, ALBERT OEHLEN et al.

Nacktheit der Zeichnung: Arbeiten in Schwarz auf Weiss von Beckmann Bis Warhol (group show)
Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst Augsburg
30 September – 4 December 2022

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André Butzer, Ohne Titel, 2021, photo courtesy of André Butzer and Galerie Christine Mayer, München
André Butzer, Ohne Titel, 2021, photo courtesy of André Butzer and Galerie Christine Mayer, München

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

André Butzer, Ohne Titel, 2021, photo courtesy of André Butzer and Galerie Christine Mayer, München
André Butzer, Ohne Titel, 2021, photo courtesy of André Butzer and Galerie Christine Mayer, München

Additional:

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Seine Kunst und Seine Zeit (film screening)
filmkunst 66, Berlin
10, 17 and 24 April, 14:30 pm

André Butzer

On three days in April, the filmkunst 66 cinema in Berlin will host the first German screenings of André Butzer, seine Kunst und Seine Zeit, a film by Rudij Bergmann.

From 2017 to 2023, filmmaker Rudij Bergmann accompanied André Butzer on numerous occasions at his solo exhibitions in Berlin, Madrid, New York, Los Angeles and Paris, as well as in his studio or on mountain hikes. With contributions from collectors, gallerists, friends and family, the film is an intricate testimony to Butzer’s artistic vision, pictorial thinking and practice at large.

Tickets to the film screening

André Butzer

ANDRÉ BUTZER

»… und der Tod ist auch ein Leben.« (solo show)
Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence
22 March – 9 June 2024

André Butzer

Museo Stefano Bardini will host a substantial exhibition dedicated to André Butzer. Organised alongside a further solo exhibition at Museo Novecento, Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, these two presentations constitute the artist’s first institutional solo exhibitions in Italy and allow visitors to explore Butzer’s whole artistic career. 

In »… und der Tod ist auch ein Leben.«, a series of 22 paintings will establish a dialogue between the artist and the Museo Stefano Bardini, starting with a re-imagining of the museum’s ‘Hall of Madonnas’. Here, Butzer’s portraits – defined by their bright faces, large eyes, and golden hair – will confront masterworks in portraiture from the museum’s collection and thereby invite viewers to consider the shared colorist origins of these works. Alongside paintings, the exhibition will also include a selection of Butzer’s drawings and watercolours, all presented alongside masterworks of the Italian Renaissance. 

André Butzer

ANDRÉ BUTZER

André Butzer (solo show)
GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg
15 March – 14 July 2024

Installation view: André Butzer, GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, 2024, photo: Andreas Brücklmair, courtesy of Augsburg und GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst e. V. Augsburg, 2024
Installation view: André Butzer, GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, 2024, photo: Andreas Brücklmair, courtesy of Augsburg und GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst e. V. Augsburg, 2024

With this extensive exhibition of André Butzer's work, the GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst builds upon its major monographic exhibitions of the 1990s. Since its foundation, important bodies of work by Georg Baselitz, Günther Förg, Albert Oehlen and A. R. Penck were presented for the first time at the institution in Augsburg. Even the design of the exhibition catalogue is deliberately based on one of the first GfG catalogues, namely the one by Förg from 1994.

For this exhibition, Butzer has created a cycle of 27 works on paper, which is complemented by a retrospective group of 22 further sheets, the oldest of which dates from the year 2000. In addition to the drawings and watercolours, there will also be seven paintings of very different sizes on view. This grouping opens up Butzer's oeuvre in an exemplary way, allowing insight into the development of his characteristic figures and wider thematic world.

GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst

Installation view: André Butzer, GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, 2024, photo: Andreas Brücklmair, courtesy of Augsburg und GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst e. V. Augsburg, 2024
Installation view: André Butzer, GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, 2024, photo: Andreas Brücklmair, courtesy of Augsburg und GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst e. V. Augsburg, 2024

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung (solo show)
Museo Novecento, Florence
1 March – 9 June 2024

Installation view: Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, Museo Novecento, Florence, 2024, photo: Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio
Installation view: Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, Museo Novecento, Florence, 2024, photo: Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio

Museo Novecento will host a substantial exhibition dedicated to André Butzer. Organised alongside a further solo exhibition at Museo Stefano Bardini, »… und der Tod ist auch ein Leben.«, these two presentations constitute the artist’s first institutional solo exhibitions in Italy and allow visitors to explore Butzer’s whole artistic career.

Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung will be hosted in the Museo Novecento’s former Leopoldine complex and will bring together 30 works covering the artist’s career. The selection emphasises several recurring and interconnected themes in Butzer’s oeuvre – life and death, perishing and rebirth, hope and despair, truth and falseness – and will be completed by new works created specifically for the exhibition. Among these is a monumental canvas, Untitled (Sternenmadonna), 2023, which will be placed in the space designed for the altarpiece inside the Renaissance building’s former chapel. 

Installation view: Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, Museo Novecento, Florence, 2024, photo: Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio
Installation view: Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, Museo Novecento, Florence, 2024, photo: Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio

ANDRÉ BUTZER et al.

Museu Inimá de Paula, Belo Horizonte (group show)
15 August 2023 – 11 February 2024

André Butzer, Untitled, 2022,  photo: def image
André Butzer, Untitled, 2022, photo: def image

Work by André Butzer is included in a group exhibition at Museu Inimá de Paula, which presents the work of seminal artists who illustrate both the conceptual continuities and ruptures of art in the 21st century. Presenting a plurality of techniques, materials and artistic languages, the exhibition offers different ways of understanding contemporary art. 


Museu Inimá de Paula

André Butzer, Untitled, 2022,  photo: def image
André Butzer, Untitled, 2022, photo: def image

ALBERT OEHLEN

Albert Oehlen (solo show)
Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen
27 August – 17 December 2023

Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher
Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher

When Albert Oehlen set out as a painter in the late 1970s, it was a time out of joint. Given German history, terrorism, 'No Future,' and Nineteen-Eighty-Four as well as the permanent threat of all-out nuclear war, painting could not pretend that the world was safe and sound. As the world shattered, so did painting. As all symbols, signs, and means were damaged and devoid of meaning, he unmasked painting in all its dubiousness. How is one to tell authentic gesture from blunt reproduction, genuine emotion from a disillusioned readymade copy? Oehlen accepts the shattering and transforms it into the basis of his painting. He invents an overtly fragmented image, which is as disoriented as the reality, in which it partakes. Traces, stimuli, and after-images of reality flash stroboscopically across his canvases. It is through this attitude that he has achieved an exceptional degree of painterly liberty, With each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, thereby granting an appropriate form to a diffuse reality. 

For the first time, Albert Oehlen has created an expansive all-over installation, spanning the entirety of the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall, into which 12 paintings have been playfully integrated.

Friedrichs Foundation

Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher
Installation view: Albert Oehlen, Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen, 2023, photo: Günzel | Rademacher

ALBERT OEHLEN

Ömega Man, 2023 (outdoor sculpture) 
Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen / Rodenhof
On view from 15 July 2023

Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image
Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image

Albert Oehlen’s monumental sculpture Ömega Man, 2023, is now on view to the public in Weidingen, where it emerges from the vast landscape of the Südeifel. Its simplified form and slightly raised steel bars, recessed into their concrete casting, evoke the lightness of a drawing. Here, the persistent importance of the line in Oehlen’s work becomes evident, appearing simultaneously curved and controlled. In this work, the artist uses elements which are both abstract and figurative to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, all the while continuing to acknowledge the importance of classical models. Massive yet fragile in its isolation, Oehlen's Ömega Man appears like a monument from the future. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is here written with an umlaut, thereby referring to the artist’s own name. 

Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen

Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image
Albert Oehlen, Ömega Man, 2023, photo: def image

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Maikäfer flieg! (publication)
Published by Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Edited by Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Text by Hannah Eckstein

Design: Studio Martin Steiner, courtesy of Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Design: Studio Martin Steiner, courtesy of Kunstverein Friedrichshafen

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.

Design: Studio Martin Steiner, courtesy of Kunstverein Friedrichshafen
Design: Studio Martin Steiner, courtesy of Kunstverein Friedrichshafen

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Exhibitions Galerie Max Hetzler 2003–2022 (publication)
Published by Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publications, 2022

Photo: def image
Photo: def image

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. 

Learn more

Photo: def image
Photo: def image

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Exhibition Catalogue (publication)
Published by Buchhandlung Walther and Franz König, Cologne, 2022
Edited by Günther Friedrichs
Text by Christian Malycha

Image courtesy of Friedrichs Foundation
Image courtesy of Friedrichs Foundation

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

Image courtesy of Friedrichs Foundation
Image courtesy of Friedrichs Foundation

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Incomplete catalogue raisonné of prints (publication)
Volume I: 2001–2021
Published by Edition Linn

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


ANDRÉ BUTZER

André Butzer (publication)
Published by TASCHEN
Edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth

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


ALBERT OEHLEN

The Painter, a film by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker
© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

Under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel, actor Ben Becker on screen impersonates the contemporary painter Albert Oehlen and re-creates a painting that Oehlen himself and in parallel is creating step by step in the background, with the actor improvising the process in front of the camera. The finished on-screen painting is an original “Oehlen” on which the artist himself never laid hands. The off screen blueprint painting was destroyed after principal shooting had finished.

Originally planned to be a performative statement the projects developed into a fully fledged feature film of 92 minutes, crossing formal boundaries and questioning the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity on various levels.

The Painter follows the artist / actor as he is struggling and suffering along this process with us watching in joyful despair and what might happen next until the white canvas has turned into a finished painting.

The outcome is a one-man rollercoaster that appears to be a documentary but in fact is a staged and guided improvisation with the “real” process happening behind the camera. The Painter is a constant flow of the artist’s journey with elements of farce and comedy topped with emotional moments of truth...in front of and behind the camera and leaving it up to us to decide what is real and/or authentic.

Watch the trailer here.


Picture Tree International

© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker
© 2020 by Albert Oehlen, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Ben Becker

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Press Releases, Letters, Conversations, Texts, Poems, Volume 3: 1999–2021 (publication)

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


ANDRÉ BUTZER

Press Releases, Letters, Conversations, Texts, Poems 199 –2020, Volume 2 (publication)

© André Butzer, Verlag für moderne Kunst
© André Butzer, Verlag für moderne Kunst

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.

© André Butzer, Verlag für moderne Kunst
© André Butzer, Verlag für moderne Kunst

ANDRÉ BUTZER

Selected Press Releases, Letters, Interviews, Texts, Poems 1999–2017 (publication)

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.