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Drawings & Notes

22 December 2022
André Butzer Untitled (Todes-Blei), 2001 Ink on paper - contemporary drawing, drawings, work on paper, contemporary art, art on paper

André Butzer

Untitled (Todes-Blei), 2001
Ink on paper
29.7 x 21 cm

André ButzerThüringer Wald (Works on Paper 2001–2022)
5 November 2022 – 7 January 2023
Nino Mier Gallery

André Butzer
Untitled, 2002
Watercolor and pencil on paper
48.2 x 66 cm

[from the pressrelease]
Thüringer Wald (Works on Paper 2001–2022) is a survey of the past two decades. This selection of works on paper captures the full expressive diversity of André Butzer’s practice. The formal range present in these works, reflects his thematic interest in the opposing poles of modernity: its horrors, particularly those of 20th century Germany, and its wonders. 

Figuration and abstraction always are one upon Butzer’s highly chromatic and solidified picture planes. Certain images and forms repeat across the papers in circuits. Works containing tangles of scribbles or intersecting bands of color lay bare the apparatus of representation. Other works appropriate pinnacles of painterly representation—like a reproductions of Raphael’s famous self-portrait, inscribed with a large, red N for Butzer’s utopian place in space that is his NASAHEIM.  

Regarding Butzer’s works on paper, Gwen Allen, professor of art history and director of the School of Art at San Francisco State University, writes: “As a draftsman, Butzer is as fiercely uninhibited as he is a painter, employing a vast repertoire of linear expression […]. If, at the dawn of modernist abstraction, such expressive license served as a foil to the mechanization of the industrial age, Butzer’s drawings prompt us to consider what such properties might signify today, in our own post-industrial—and increasingly post-human—era.” 

André Butzer
Untitled, 2019
Pencil on paper
54.6 x 35.6 cm

André Butzer
Untitled (ALL! ALL!), 2019
Watercolor, crayon, and pencil on paper
35.6 x 27.9 cm

30 July 2019

André Butzer

untitled, 2007
Pencil on paper
32 × 24 cm

André Butzer
29 June – 7 September 2019
Gallery Kirchgasse, Steckborn

André Butzer

untitled, 2019
Acrylic and pencil on paper
37.1 × 28.7 cm

[from the pressrelease]
With his self-proclaimed “Science Fiction Expressionism,” André Butzer (1973) became one of the most renowned and influential painters of his generation in the mid-1990s. Between pop culture and world history, Butzer created a candidly expressive and comic-like art cosmology. His fictions forego a clear narration and a hermetic approach or stylistic features. Butzer’s works generate their own content and stories; painted energy positioned between geometry and arbitrariness, humor and severity, danger and charm.

With the N Paintings, a series begun in 2010, Butzer’s characteristic motifs and colors reappear. The works reveal their origins: line and plane, vertical and horizontal. The shift towards this radical abstraction was not a simple break with earlier paintings. Considered together, all images explore the reciprocal condition of figuration and abstraction, of fiction and the reality of painting.

André Butzer

Untitled, 2008
watercolor on paper
29 x 41 cm

André Butzer

untitled, 2019
Acrylic and pencil on paper
28.7 × 37.1 cm

A weblog about contemporary drawing, scribbles, notes and an occasional painting or photograph. Click on images to go directly to original pictures, or on the links to learn more about the artist involved. 

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