SELECTED WORKS BY André Butzer
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André Butzer
Ahnenbild 2411
2006
oil on canvas
280 x 460cm |
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Andre Butzer's work explores the romanticism of painting from a contemporary stand point. Inspired equally from popular culture and art history's greats from Ensor to De Kooning and Guston Butzer's wildly rendered canvases exude a frenetic creative energy redolent of the artistic myths of passion, power, and genius. Executed on monumental scale, Butzer's paintings are a triumph of style over substance as his highly articulate techniques and compositions regurgitate graffiti scribbles and cartoon forms. |
André Butzer
Obstgarten Edvard Munch
2006
oil on canvas
260 x 200 cm |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
oil on canvas
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Balancing between abstraction and figuration, Butzer's crude aesthetics point to a modern day primitivism. Positing an instinctive response to the over saturation of media imagery and the constrictive weight of art history, Butzer's paintings strive for, yet acknowledge the futility, of genuine expression. This ideological bankruptcy runs throughout Butzer's work as a kind of 'slacker virtuoso' which humorously combines angst of modernism with an unapologetic Kippenberger-like cynicism. |
André Butzer
Untitled (Monochromes Bild)
2007
oil on canvas
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
oil on canvas
260 x 340 cm |
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Butzer's canvases bully the viewer with their aggressive intensity: their surfaces textured like corroded debris, carved through with manic gestures, and ooze gobs of offensive colours, while reoccurring motifs of screaming faces, phalluses, ecstasy tablet logos, and sperm war against each other in anarchic ritual. Raw with egoism, machismo, and zeal, Butzer's paintings serve up contemporary anxiety with a violent potency that's vehement, heroic and bereft. |
André Butzer
Erinnerung an Gottfried Feder (Nachricht vom Tode)
2007
oil on canvas
260 x 340 cms |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
Oil on canvas
260 x 340 cms |
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André Butzer
Friedens-Siemens XVII
2007
Oil on canvas
260 x 320 cm |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
Oil on canvas
260 x 340 cm |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
Oil on canvas
340 x 260cm |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2007
Oil on canvas
200 x 260 cm |
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André Butzer
Untitled
2008
Oil on canvas
340 x 250 cms |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
andre butzer at max hetzler - berlin
For his first show with Max Hetzler, Andre Butzer presented eight large oil paintings in the main gallery, plus a selection of watercolors and drawings in another room. The disparity between the two spaces was marked. Entering the first gallery meant being almost overwhelmed by the size, color and smell of the paintings; the watercolors and drawings in the back were thin and flat by comparison.
Seven of the paintings measure 8 feet 2 inches by 6 1/2 feet and depict a single figure. Woman (2002), for example, presents a character with a skull-like head, black circles for eyes, and a simple curve for a smile. Her big black hairdo plays against a magenta background. She resembles a royal Egyptian mummy whose face didn't survive as well as her wig. She raises an orange stump of an arm in jovial greeting.
The eighth, Chips and Pepsi and Medicine (2003), after which the show was named, is huge at 9 3/4 by 14 1/2 feet, and contains seven grotesquely childlike figures, smiling and waving as if assembled for a celebration. The heavily applied reds, blues, yellows and greens, smeared and dripped across the canvas, create forms that melt into one another. Often, it is only possible to distinguish one character from the next by the change in color. To get an idea of the impact of this picture, imagine a hybrid of de Kooning's iconic "Woman" paintings and any of Ensor's threateningly comic "skeleton" images re-created without the complexity of line and form. Subtitled Happiness, this was the most exuberant work in the exhibition. In it, Halloween pranksters, carnival dancers and aliens seem to pose for the kind of high-spirited group portrait that has everyone mugging for the camera.
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Source: findarticles.com
andre butzer at METRO PICTURES- NEW YORK
Visitors to Andre Butzer's recent show at Metro Pictures found themselves, in the opening gallery, stared down by four giant, cartoonlike figures from 10-by-7-foot paintings barely big enough to hold them. All four wear antique, stiff white collars above shapeless clothes. The canvases on which they appear are so thickly impastoed as to verge on the sculptural. The 35-year-old artist's bravado neo-expressionism plainly owes a debt to its 1980s precedents, though Butzer professes to be as interested in the future as the past, describing his practice as science fiction expressionism. While it's easy to find yourself thinking of artists ranging from de Kooning to Basquiat, Joan Mitchell to Joyce Pensato, Butzer's work fully holds its own. This is his New York solo debut after one-man shows, over just the last couple of years, in Munich, Vienna, London, Moscow and Berlin. The busy artist has also founded an artists' collective and is a publisher and editor.
In Roter Mann Edvard Munch (all works 2007), a mustard-shirted man stares from round black eyes in a face resembling that in The Scream. Resting on the painting's surface are diagram-like, squiggly brown and blue lines describing connected squares and triangles. The subject of Untitled (Wanderer) wears a brown coat, one white glove and a mad grimace. He lunges from a green ground, his eyes also great black circles. Splotches of yellow and orange, and seemingly a whole tube of red, lie indiscriminately on figure and ground. Each figure has two pairs of flaplike shapes emerging from his cheeks; with their staring eyes, they resemble SS death's heads. Their comparatively innocent-looking, smiling companions Heinrich Butzer Limonadenfabrikant ('lemonade manufacturer'), with his oval, citrusy-yellow head, and Frau, with her pink coat and friendly wave, both have oval eyes with prominent whites, as if drawn by a child.
These paintings' free intermingling of abstraction and figuration found further expression in Metro's back room, where the 15-by-27-foot Viele Tote im Heimatland: Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Micky and Donald! Was flanked by two 11-foot-high untitled abstractions. The large canvas, whose title translates to 'many dead in the homeland' pictures a primal stew in which floats 16 heads over a broadly brushed blue, green and orange ground. Faces and ground alike are splattered with read; the combination of violence with na've drawing evolves a child's rendition of a death camp or the aftermath of school shooting. Another room displayed several smaller, sketchlike works, Untitled (mehrere Figuren) resembled a group snapshot of Butzer's trademark characters as children. Untitled (mit-N-Haus) depicts a couple outside a red N, for Nasaheim. Butzer's fictional combination of NASA and Anaheim, the California city ('home on the Santa Ana River') originally settled by Bavarians and later by Disneyland. Nasaheim's curious melding of science and fantasy, juvenile and sophisticated, German and America, nicely encapsulates Butzer's ambitious project.
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Source: artinamericamagazine.com
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Other artists in GERMANIA:NEW ART FROM GERMANY
Gert & Uwe Tobias | Markus Amm | Dirk Bell | Felix Gmelin | Stefan Kürten | Jutta Koether | Ulrich Lamsfuss | Andrea Lehmann | Jonathan Meese | Kirstine Roepstorff | Julian Rosefeldt | Christoph Ruckhäberle | Corinne Wasmuht | Thomas Zipp
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