Skarstedt to open 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.
102 3/8 x 66 15/16 inches 260 x 170 cm © André Butzer. Courtesy of the artist and Skarstedt, New York. Photo: John Berens.
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.
André Butzer, 13th February – 26th April 2025 Skarstedt Chelsea
About the artist
Born in Stuttgart in 1973, lives in Berlin.
Selected Institutional Solo Exhibitions
Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, Museo Novecento, Florence, Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence, St Nikolaus, Innsbruck, and nw9 Kunstraum der Stiftung Kunstwissenschaft, Cologne (2024); Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Kebbel Villa | Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Miettinen Collection, Berlin, and Kunstverein Friedrichshafen (2023); Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen (2022); Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and Museum of the Light, Hokuto (2020); IKOB Musée d’Art Contemporain, Eupen (2018); Växjö Konsthall, Växjö (2017); Bayerisches Armeemuseum, Ingolstadt, and Neue Galerie Gladbeck (2016); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2015); Halle für Kunst, Graz (2014); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, and Kunsthistorisches Museum / Theseustempel, Vienna (2011); Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2009); Kunstverein Ulm (2005); Kunstverein Heilbronn (2004)
Selected Public Collections
Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Art Institute of Chicago; Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York; CICA Center of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver; Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen / Bonn; Galerie moderního um?ní, Hradci Králové; Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen; Hall Art Foundation, Reading / VT | Derneburg; Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Hölderlinturm, Tübingen; IKOB Musée d’Art Contemporain, Eupen; Kupferstichkabinett / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Marciano Art Collection, Los Angeles; MARe Museum, Bucharest; MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Museo Novecento, Florence; Museum Reinhard Ernst, Wiesbaden; Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Rubell Museum, Miami; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Space K, Seoul; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus / Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung, Munich; Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck; University of Washington, Seattle; Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongju-si; Yuz Museum, Shanghai
