Katharina Grosse has unveiled her first ever work in glass, Ein Glas Wasser, bitte (A Glass of Water, Please), developed especially for the Museum Reinhard Ernst in Wiesbaden. Comprising a large stained-glass wall weighing several tonnes, the work harnesses the complementary colours blue and orange to examine ‘how these colours mix, cross, repel, disturb and enrich each other in a watery state.’ As the artist states: ‘This energy has a transformational power that can inspire and excite all who are in front of or behind the glass wall. It shows that the world is in flux.’

Museum Reinhard Ernst

For her exhibition Shifting the Stars, Katharina Grosse will occupy the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s monumental Grande Nef, a space that soars to a height of more than 20 metres. Some 8000 m² of fabric suspended from the ceiling by enormous knots will form a new space inside the gallery, taking the form of billowing drapery whose exuberant colours and energy will spill out from the Grande Nef onto the forecourt of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. The exhibition invites visitors to pass through a screen of paint,  plunging them into Grosse’s world of colour and movement.

Centre Pompidou Metz

For its 15th exhibition within the framework of the Hors-les-murs programme of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Espace Louis Vuitton München presents The Krazy House by Rineke Dijkstra. Created in 2009, Dijkstra’s video installation continues her visual explorations into adolescence. For this piece, the artist asked five young people to dance to their favourite music in a special studio set up on the floor of a Liverpool nightclub. Engulfed in the dim, hushed, blueish environment, the dancers move before a plain white background, each lost in their own image. The artist has reimagined the display of the installation specifically for Espace Louis Vuitton München, shedding new light on this seminal artwork.

Espace Louis Vuitton

Kunstmuseum Bonn will present the first comprehensive exhibition of Katharina Grosse’s studio paintings. Known internationally for her expansive works which she paints on-site, often including extensive sections of exterior spaces, Grosse subverts conventional relationships between foreground and background in her paintings, thereby opening up new imaginative worlds.

Presenting around forty studio paintings from the late 1980s to the present, the exhibition is divided into two thematic fields: Returns/Revisions/Inventions and Fissures/Ruptures. While the former includes a broad array of paintings created since the early 1990s and sheds light on the artist’s cyclical manner of working, the latter concentrates on the various methods with which Grosse breaks up the medium of painting in order to extend its borders. This endeavour involves the inclusion of natural materials such as soil and branches so as to reinterpret the customary relationship between painting and physical space.

Kunstmuseum Bonn

Published in conjunction with the artist’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin: Spectrum Without Traces, 17 March – 30 April 2023.

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Stadtpfarrkirche Innsbruck St. Nikolaus in Austria presents Farbtheorie, an exhibition of work by André Butzer. Curated by Bishop Hermann Glettler, the exhibition places new focus on Butzer’s Colour Theory paintings from 2009, which incorporate a fourth ‘flesh colour’ to the primary trio of red, yellow and blue. Since this period, Butzer has sought to reintroduce the corporeal or incarnate into the abstract image in his practice.  

Exhibited for the first time since their execution 15 years ago, Butzer’s four monumental paintings Untitled (Red), Untitled (Yellow), Untitled (Blue) and Untitled (Flesh Colour) are presented alongside one of the artist’s ‘N-Bilder’, from 2012–2013.

Work by André Butzer is included in How to Collect Art: the Karel Tutsch Story, a long-term exhibition presenting the lifelong work of Karel Tutsch (1941–2008), acclaimed gallerist and owner of one of the most important collections in the Czech Republic. The exhibition forms an encyclopedia of Czech art from the mid-1960s to the turn of the millennium, ending with a section devoted to the early-noughties Berlin art scene.

GMU

Museo Stefano Bardini will host a substantial exhibition dedicated to André Butzer. Organised alongside a further solo exhibition at Museo Novecento, Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung, these two presentations constitute the artist’s first institutional solo exhibitions in Italy and allow visitors to explore Butzer’s whole artistic career. 

In »… und der Tod ist auch ein Leben.«, a series of 22 paintings will establish a dialogue between the artist and the Museo Stefano Bardini, starting with a re-imagining of the museum’s ‘Hall of Madonnas’. Here, Butzer’s portraits – defined by their bright faces, large eyes, and golden hair – will confront masterworks in portraiture from the museum’s collection and thereby invite viewers to consider the shared colorist origins of these works. Alongside paintings, the exhibition will also include a selection of Butzer’s drawings and watercolours, all presented alongside masterworks of the Italian Renaissance. 

With this extensive exhibition of André Butzer's work, the GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst builds upon its major monographic exhibitions of the 1990s. Since its foundation, important bodies of work by Georg Baselitz, Günther Förg, Albert Oehlen and A. R. Penck were presented for the first time at the institution in Augsburg. Even the design of the exhibition catalogue is deliberately based on one of the first GfG catalogues, namely the one by Förg from 1994.

For this exhibition, Butzer has created a cycle of 27 works on paper, which is complemented by a retrospective group of 22 further sheets, the oldest of which dates from the year 2000. In addition to the drawings and watercolours, there will also be seven paintings of very different sizes on view. This grouping opens up Butzer's oeuvre in an exemplary way, allowing insight into the development of his characteristic figures and wider thematic world.

GfG Gesellschaft für Gegenwartskunst

Museo Novecento will host a substantial exhibition dedicated to André Butzer. Organised alongside a further solo exhibition at Museo Stefano Bardini, »… und der Tod ist auch ein Leben.«, these two presentations constitute the artist’s first institutional solo exhibitions in Italy and allow visitors to explore Butzer’s whole artistic career.

Liebe, Glaube und Hoffnung will be hosted in the Museo Novecento’s former Leopoldine complex and will bring together 30 works covering the artist’s career. The selection emphasises several recurring and interconnected themes in Butzer’s oeuvre – life and death, perishing and rebirth, hope and despair, truth and falseness – and will be completed by new works created specifically for the exhibition. Among these is a monumental canvas, Untitled (Sternenmadonna), 2023, which will be placed in the space designed for the altarpiece inside the Renaissance building’s former chapel. 

A new publication focusing on Carroll Dunham's pivotal ‘Green Period.,’ is available for purchase now. Bringing together prints, drawings, and paintings created by the artist between 2018 and 2022, the publication gives an overview of one of his most distinctive bodies of works. Using the colour green as a pictorial and expressive tool, Dunham depicts figures in an archaic world of his own making. In these ‘figurative’ works he explores themes of intimacy, race, sex, and aging, as well as his own graphic and painterly languages.

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This new publication provides a compelling overview of exhibitions of André Butzer at Galerie Max Hetzler since his first with the gallery in 2003, charting his 17 solo and 10 group exhibitions in Berlin, Paris and London. Installation views and large-format illustrations of all exhibited works are accompanied by contemporary texts including reviews and catalogue essays.​ The book is now available for purchase on the Galerie Max Hetzler publications website. 

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Made in close collaboration with the artist, this unprecedented huge-format survey presents the future and origins of his painting according to André Butzer. From his early works of “Science Fiction Expressionism” that centered around a cast of figures at home both in space and in culturally occupied Europe, to his exploration of abstraction’s far limits in the seemingly black N-Paintings, Butzer emerges as an ever-inventive colorist who finds a new beginning in each work.

This is the first book first to span the full range of André Butzer’s oeuvre from 1999 to 2021, the works’ progression gaining an almost musical drive of development, return, and new beginnings. The plates are interspersed with contemporary quotes from the artist that illuminate his idiosyncratic stance as a background to the work, as well as photos from his archives. The introductory essay, written by Hans Werner Holzwarth, investigates the different work phases, and places the artist’s ideas in a wider discourse of abstraction and figuration after the end of either genre. And, most importantly, the book’s pristine, huge-format illustrations fully evidence the finesse as a colorist that place this artist among the internationally most recognized painters of his generation.

“Expressionism was about going back to nature and nakedness, about inner more than outer space. Now we can give this field a new task—to be informed by seriality, post-industrialism, and modern mankind’s artificiality. So I include organic and non-organic parts, fake nature and fake human. Titian said painting is about flesh and water, and I say it is about flesh and lemonade.”

— André Butzer

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TASCHEN

All good things come in threes and so do André Butzer’s collected writings. The third volume is elegantly sharp and poignant. Editor Alexander Linn continues to explore the unique fictitious universe, Butzer calls »NASAHEIM«. Boldly touching on the latter’s own work and biography, art history as well as music in numerous letters, in-depth conversations and poems. Guided by the simple question: What is real?, Butzer searches for »the actual location of painting, the space in-between. It’s a very esoteric but easy to understand conception of truth.«

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Edition Linn