ANDRÉ BUTZER
Fränkische Tänze, Gallery 1
Thüringer Wald (Works on Paper 2001–2022), Gallery 2
Vaterländischer Gesang: Friedrich Hölderlin, Gallery 4
Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles
November 5, 2022 - January 7, 2023
Nino Mier Gallery presents a series of three concurrent solo exhibitions by ANDRÉ BUTZER (b. 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany). Paintings and works on paper by André Butzer span Galleries 1, 2, and 4 at the gallery West Hollywood locations, while a joint exhibition by Jayme Burtis (b. 1969 in Los Angeles, CA) and André Butzer is on view in Glassell Park.
André Butzer: Fränkische Tänze - Gallery 1
The electrifying, large-scale paintings in Fränkische Tänze all feature iterations of André Butzer’s iconic characters of the Woman, the Wanderer and the Friedens-Siemens, ever-evolving and present in his work since the late ’90s. In his recent paintings, they appear in single portraits, as floating heads and, once, as a cautious couple.
The consolation of opposing forces such as exploration and familiarity, loneliness and communion, despairing life and hopeful death animates Butzer’s artistic practice: the Woman is a kind of guiding star, pointing towards wholesomeness, the Wanderer incarnates grief, loss and the burden of history, whereas the Friedens-Siemens embodies the equalizing middle amid these extreme opposites.
André Butzer, with enduring confidence in an inhospitable world, aligns the surrounding color fields with his figures and their individual chromatic fabric. Realized in simplicity and fullness, all is of the very same matter and sentiment. Colors and shapes, the figures and their surroundings echo each other. In coloristic unison, everything comes into appearance as one.
André Butzer’s exhibition Fränkische Tänze pays homage to the seminal New Music piece of the same name by German composer Walter Zimmermann (b. 1949), known for his novel fusion of Franconian folk songs and post-Morton Feldman minimal techniques, of the local and the universal.
André Butzer: Thüringer Wald (Works on Paper 2001–2022) - Gallery 2
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: Vaterländischer Gesang: Friedrich Hölderlin - Gallery 4
The figure of the Wanderer is at the center of Vaterländischer Gesang: Friedrich Hölderlin, in one monumental oil painting from 2016 and a series of five, delicate pencil drawings. In each composition, the Wanderer sits with his legs extended in front of him, so that his body forms a right angle mirroring the elemental pictorial directions.
His head faces the viewer, teeth bared, eyes barren, and extends his left arm in front of him, possibly recalling either a Nazi salute, an erect phallus or just a farewell wave of the hand. The Wanderer’s tense, seated body undercuts the fascistic ideal of a muscular, self-possessed posture, while his contorted facial features recall the expressions both of Edvard Munch’s and Walt Disney’s protagonists. On paper, the Wanderer’s form disintegrates into a series of violent, jagged marks—as though the troublesome histories enshrined in its character are vehemently revealed and laid bare.
The Wanderer, however, does not just signify Germany’s fraught past. Rather, it embodies a fundamental state of universal homelessness, also familiar to the artist. Particularly, as the title references German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose epistolary novel Hyperion has ever since been a most important touchstone for André Butzer. Thus, the sitting figure could also be a portrait of the singing poet Hölderlin, conveying the “yearning search for a peaceful existence.”
ANDRÉ BUTZER
André Butzer was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1973 and lives in Berlin-Wannsee.
Institutional solo exhibitions include: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2023); Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen (2022); YUZ Museum, Shanghai, and Museum of the Light, Hokuto (2020); IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen (2018); Växjö Konsthall, Växjö (2017); Bayerisches Armeemuseum, Ingolstadt, and Neue Galerie Gladbeck (2016); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2015); Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz (2014); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, and Kunsthistorisches Museum / Theseustempel, Vienna (2011); Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2009); Kunstverein Ulm (2005); Kunstverein Heilbronn (2004).
Selected public collections include: Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Art Institute of Chicago; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York; Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Faye G. Allen Centre for the Visual Arts, University of Washington, Seattle; Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen / Bonn; Hall Art Foundation, Reading / VT | Derneburg; Hölderlinturm, Tübingen; IKOB Musée d’Art Contemporain, Eupen; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin State Museums, 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; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Nationalgalerie / Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Rubell Museum, Miami; YUZ Museum, Shanghai.
NINO MIER GALLERY LOS ANGELES
Gallery 1 7277 Santa Monica Blvd
Gallery 2 7313 Santa Monica Blvd
Gallery 4 1107 Greenacre Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90046
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