Skarstedt is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition with acclaimed German painter André Butzer. Made specifically for the gallery’s new Chelsea space, he has created 10 large-scale paintings as well as 15 works on paper.
Since 1994, in direct succession to Georg Baselitz and Albert Oehlen, André Butzer’s fundamental fusion of European Expressionism and American ready-made pop culture, the conceptual repetition and apparent seriality of his iconic characters as well as his insistence on bare human dignity have been testament to his courageous and continuous inquiry into societal contradictions and social non-conformity.
Butzer’s Synthetic Paintings appear to be blasted and contorted, atomized into countless abstract particles. No painting can rely on any prefabricated compositional order. Enormous discharges of colors, forms and patches, ornamental bands, framework and planes—placeless and unstable.
The huge, solitary figures, as austere as ludicrous, are a challenge to our image of man. Their towering, composite bodies are industrialized, permeated by technology, maltreated by devices and pieces of apparatus, distorted, destroyed from within.
But at that precarious moment, in which the human figure is completely negated, dissolved, broken, and hollowed out, Butzer begins. In the face of absolute annihilation, nothing remains but mere existence. An enduring basis for living. Vibrant and vital. From there, he builds his figures and thus the entire image anew.
For a figure is nothing that ever was a given in painting. Unique and inimitable, it incorporates both creation and destruction, permanent obliteration and renewal. Butzer decisively realizes the substantial coherence of these opposites. »I want to be right in the middle of these destructive and redemptive contradictions«, he says. In every image, opposites such as placing and dispersion, disruption and solidity, affirmation and negation reunite and therefore converge into a balanced, all-encompassing wholeness.
Each painting establishes its own, fragile stance from within itself. The straightening up of the figures, their presence and posture, their foothold and powerless composure, all this corresponds to the pervasive verticality of the canvases like an echo. A painterly totality, in which color transfigures every form and body.
The entire painting becomes a coloristically built “pictorial figure,” which “has no validity outside the picture and which is only potent in this one image and on this specific plane.” A trembling, truthful image of man, made whole again amidst fracturing and dissolving. Just as Butzer’s figures suddenly fit into the image, it is as if, even we, might fit into the world again.
André Butzer confronts our frail existence. His paintings reveal with utmost urgency that a dignified life, the integrity of body and soul, must be preserved not only in painting, but everywhere all at once.
