Across The Arts Club’s Drawing Room and Ante Room, André Butzer will show a selection of new and existing works. Alongside the artist's distinctive female figure, the exhibition also sees a series of new brushstroke paintings on canvas. The exhibition lays bare the building blocks, as well as the colouristic and historical heritage of Butzer's paintings, which are neither figurative nor abstract but complete beings of the unison and presence of colour.

André Butzer’s Untitled, 2020, is included in The Day I Saw You: Portraits from the AMMA Foundation. Featuring a selection of portraits by 25 international artists from the AMMA collection, the exhibition presents different perspectives on portraiture and the human condition in art.

Queretaro Contemporary Art Museum

When Albert Oehlen set out as a painter in the late 1970s, it was a time out of joint. Given German history, terrorism, 'No Future,' and Nineteen-Eighty-Four as well as the permanent threat of all-out nuclear war, painting could not pretend that the world was safe and sound. As the world shattered, so did painting. As all symbols, signs, and means were damaged and devoid of meaning, he unmasked painting in all its dubiousness. How is one to tell authentic gesture from blunt reproduction, genuine emotion from a disillusioned readymade copy? Oehlen accepts the shattering and transforms it into the basis of his painting. He invents an overtly fragmented image, which is as disoriented as the reality, in which it partakes. Traces, stimuli, and after-images of reality flash stroboscopically across his canvases. It is through this attitude that he has achieved an exceptional degree of painterly liberty, With each new image, he updates and renews the possibilities and impossibilities of painting, thereby granting an appropriate form to a diffuse reality. 

For the first time, Albert Oehlen has created an expansive all-over installation, spanning the entirety of the Friedrichs Foundation’s exhibition hall, into which 12 paintings have been playfully integrated.

Friedrichs Foundation

Trunk Road and Branch Roads at the Long Museum, Shanghai, is the first institutional exhibition of the late German artist Günther Förg (1952–2013) in Asia and the most comprehensive presentation to date solely dedicated to his painting. The exhibition covers four decades and includes 100 major works, monumental paintings and delicate miniatures alike as well as rarely shown series. In eight continuous chapters, the compelling story of a painter’s life unfolds, who pushed himself to the brink of discord – only to preserve art in a precarious state of balance. Förg’s artistic pursuit made him both a cautious preserver and at the same time a sagacious innovator. Opposites, he believed, necessitate and complement each other. His painting constitutes a permanent balancing act. It is a painting of opposites acted out, among which eventually an equilibrium sets in. These opposites sparked his imagination throughout his life and still inspire us today. Moving confidently between times and epochs, between laconic minimalism and expressive abundance, Günther Förg paved his own unique path into art history.

Long Museum

Albert Oehlen’s monumental sculpture Ömega Man, 2023, is now on view to the public in Weidingen, where it emerges from the vast landscape of the Südeifel. Its simplified form and slightly raised steel bars, recessed into their concrete casting, evoke the lightness of a drawing. Here, the persistent importance of the line in Oehlen’s work becomes evident, appearing simultaneously curved and controlled. In this work, the artist uses elements which are both abstract and figurative to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, all the while continuing to acknowledge the importance of classical models. Massive yet fragile in its isolation, Oehlen's Ömega Man appears like a monument from the future. Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is here written with an umlaut, thereby referring to the artist’s own name. 

Stiftung zur Förderung Zeitgenössischer Kunst in Weidingen

Following André Butzer's first institutional solo exhibition in Bavaria (Bayerisches Armeemuseum, 2018), the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus presents the German painter, born in 1973, with a very special show. Here, for the first time, the artist completely abandons the inclusion of walls as hanging surfaces for his paintings – as well as the paintings themselves.

Kebbel Villa

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents a solo exhibition devoted to André Butzer, which is retrospective and prospective alike. Coinciding with the artist’s 50th birthday in June 2023, it will feature a well-chosen selection of his most iconic works of the last two decades. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, it will bring together 22 paintings from 1999 to 2022 and reveal the full scope of Butzer’s experienced painterly horizon. Given the uncertain times we find ourselves in at present, the museum’s director Guillermo Solana is convinced that the exhibition will emphatically confirm Butzer’s belief that paintings are ‘localizations of the greatest despair and the greatest hope, which is why they come closest to the very joy and aid we are in dire need of’.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

On the occasion of the painter's 50th birthday in June 2023, Timo Miettinen will host a special show arranged by André Butzer, including works never shown before, among them Untitled, 1999, from the artist’s personal collection. The exhibition at Salon Dahlmann pays tribute to Butzer’s 30 years as a painter and coincides with his presentation at the Villa Kebbel | Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf as well as his comprehensive retrospective at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

In addition to his own exhibition at Salon Dahlmann, Butzer has selected 18 works by artists from the Miettinen Collection for a presentation in the collector’s living quarters. Both exhibitions open at the Gallery Weekend Berlin, which runs from 27 to 30 April 2023.

Miettinen Collection

The catalogue accompanying André Butzer’s solo exhibition Maikäfer, flieg!, on view at Kunstverein Friedrichshafen from 28 January to 19 March 2023, will be available for purchase on 27 January 2023. Published by Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, the catalogue includes an essay by Hannah Eckstein.

Three monumental paintings and four accompanying watercolors by André Butzer will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Friedrichshafen. The exhibition’s title references a famous German folk song which dates back to the 17th century. Throughout the centuries, writers and musicians alike have adopted the song to various ends — the latest being the atrocities of the Second World War, Paul Celan’ desperate, yet tiny sheaves of hope and a long past journey by the artist to the Polish seaside town of Kołobrzeg. Butzer’s repurposing reveals his on-going engagement with the troublesome German history.

Kunstverein Friedrichshafen

André Butzer has created the cover for the Italian magazine Corriere della Sera’s literary supplement, La Lettura, #578.

Including, among others, features by Julia Kristeva on Dostoevsky’s Demons, the defeat of Jean-Paul Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir or Albert Camus and a tongue-in-cheek compilation by Sofia Chiarini of 51 films based on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, who was vocal about his disliking of the usual Christmas stories.

La Lettura #578

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. 

Learn more

The new exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of André Butzer’s solo exhibition at the Friedrichs Foundation in Weidingen, which was on view from 7 May to 28 August 2022, can be ordered now. The catalogue is jointly published by Buchhandlung Walther König and Franz König Köln. 

Friedrichs Foundation

A new publication of André Butzer’s prints from 2001 until 2021 has been published by Edition Linn. This comprehensive catalogue spans from the artist’s simplest linocuts, to his elaborate series composed in a variety of graphic techniques, comprising the vibrant colours of recent years.

Edition Linn

Works by Albert Oehlen are now represented at the group exhibition Space for Imaginative Actions at Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition celebrated the museum’s thirtieth anniversary and brings together monographic and thematic works from more than forty artists. 

Kunstmuseum Bonn

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

Get your copy here.

TASCHEN

Under the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel, actor Ben Becker on screen impersonates the contemporary painter Albert Oehlen and re-creates a painting that Oehlen himself and in parallel is creating step by step in the background, with the actor improvising the process in front of the camera. The finished on-screen painting is an original “Oehlen” on which the artist himself never laid hands. The off screen blueprint painting was destroyed after principal shooting had finished.

Originally planned to be a performative statement the projects developed into a fully fledged feature film of 92 minutes, crossing formal boundaries and questioning the meaning of the creative process and the struggle for authenticity on various levels.

The Painter follows the artist / actor as he is struggling and suffering along this process with us watching in joyful despair and what might happen next until the white canvas has turned into a finished painting.

The outcome is a one-man rollercoaster that appears to be a documentary but in fact is a staged and guided improvisation with the “real” process happening behind the camera. The Painter is a constant flow of the artist’s journey with elements of farce and comedy topped with emotional moments of truth...in front of and behind the camera and leaving it up to us to decide what is real and/or authentic.

Watch the trailer here.

Picture Tree International

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.«

Get your copy here.

Edition Linn

The second volume of André Butzer's collected writings has recently been published by Alexander Linn / Edition Linn. As an extension of the first volume, which focuses on the artist's writings from 1999 until 2017, this publication gathers an abundant selection of press releases, letters, conversations, texts and poems from 1994 until 2020, offering an intimate and personal insight into Butzer's painterly formation and practice.

Get your copy here.

This divertingly profound or profoundly diverting volume gathers an abundant selection of press releases, letters, interviews and conversations, prose, and poetry by painter André Butzer. Brought together for the first time, Butzer’s writings form a concise account of his artistic thinking.

Get your copy here.