Andrea Büttner Brit Meyer

About

Andrea Büttner and Brit Meyer have selected and produced new work to show together.

Büttner has painted the gallery walls as high as she can reach in a brown emulsion. On this base she has installed a pair of canvases made in a cotton twill normally used for workers’ uniforms. The stretched fabrics are shop-bought in standard colours. They are hung in a corner of the gallery, with their surfaces abutted, as if to express an embarrassment in this public display. The painted walls and stretched fabrics form structures that bookend Meyer’s works, which include pencil drawings and hand-fashioned objects.

Meyer’s processes parallel some of the sentiment found in Büttner’s work. She applies and presses coloured clay onto lumps of stone, a kind of negotiation, building up and softening roughly hewn corners. At other times clay is moulded to make small objects with the kind of eclectic forms found in archaeological digs. Occasionally these pieces are fired in a homemade kiln, to give an ineffective finish as they crack or break. There is a sense of speculative interaction, where a physical process is allowed to follow the logic of a material, like a meditation on the dispositions of clay.

Meyer’s drawings are economically sketched, half-rendered portraits or head motifs. A pair of sketches in matching yellow frames show a head with an elongated, protruding nose. Between the two drawings the head is mirrored as if turning. The simple combinations of lines used are repeated, the curves half-measured and half-expressed. Meyer’s images suggest something allegorical, drawn from the unconscious.

There is a build up across these tempered material interactions, a kind of nascent thought, material conjecture, and ritualistic work. It could be said that for both Büttner and Meyer there is an affirmation of a blind activity. For Büttner, in previous work, this has been expressed in a series of woodcuts engaging with the figure of St Francis of Assisi, with one print depicting the tears that are said to have blinded him.