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Lot Essay
A psychedelic figure with a beaming, mask-like face rears up from the vast canvas of André Butzer’s Frau (Woman) (2002). She wears green shoes and a fiery-hued dress, and raises one club-like arm against a whirling backdrop of magenta brushstrokes. Monumental in scale and saturated in colour, she seems to collapse the languages of cartoons, Die Brücke and Willem de Kooning’s Women into a single explosive presence. Her exuberant, apocalyptic life-force is typical of Butzer’s early-2000s work, which he has described as a sort of ‘science-fiction Expressionism’—plunging into the raging id of painting, and imagining what an alien might paint if they had the medium’s entire history described to them. Testament to its quality, the work was previously in the collection of Günther Förg: one of the most important German painters of the generation before Butzer, whose work also engaged in a postmodern critique of the painterly canon.
For Butzer, each painting has a volatile mind of its own, throwing up figures and images of its own accord. He handles proceedings, however, with a remarkable colourist’s eye that has won him widespread acclaim over the past three decades. Having once assisted in the studio of Albert Oehlen—who was also an early collector of his work—he can be understood in the riotous lineage of ‘bad painting’ that Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner championed during the 1980s and 1990s. While less politically driven than some of his elder compatriots, Butzer conceived his artistic practice partly in opposition to the industry and order that defined his childhood in Stuttgart, Germany’s automotive capital. His paintings have ranged widely from figuration to abstraction as he explores the medium’s freedoms, forging his own wild, ever-changing universe in the process. ‘I think of painting as the origin of life’, he says. ‘We’re always inheriting, but you can’t just take on influence for free. There has to be some thankfulness’ (A. Butzer, quoted in M. Slenske, ‘Expressionism, Now with Added Black’, Garage Magazine, 11 September 2017).
For Butzer, each painting has a volatile mind of its own, throwing up figures and images of its own accord. He handles proceedings, however, with a remarkable colourist’s eye that has won him widespread acclaim over the past three decades. Having once assisted in the studio of Albert Oehlen—who was also an early collector of his work—he can be understood in the riotous lineage of ‘bad painting’ that Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner championed during the 1980s and 1990s. While less politically driven than some of his elder compatriots, Butzer conceived his artistic practice partly in opposition to the industry and order that defined his childhood in Stuttgart, Germany’s automotive capital. His paintings have ranged widely from figuration to abstraction as he explores the medium’s freedoms, forging his own wild, ever-changing universe in the process. ‘I think of painting as the origin of life’, he says. ‘We’re always inheriting, but you can’t just take on influence for free. There has to be some thankfulness’ (A. Butzer, quoted in M. Slenske, ‘Expressionism, Now with Added Black’, Garage Magazine, 11 September 2017).