André Butzer

About

A street level gallery, in a magnificent art nouveau building, Bleibtreustraße 15/16 was formerly the home of the pioneering German avant-garde art dealer Alfred Flechtheim (1878 born in Münster; 1937 died in London), who lived there from 1923 to 1933, before the Nazi regime forced him to emigrate to London. A memorial plaque on the outside of the building commemorates him as: “art dealer, publisher and friend of modern art”.  

Situated in the heart of Berlin-Charlottenburg, the new space will join the gallery’s current locations at Bleibtreustraße 45 and Goethestraße 2/3, continuing Galerie Max Hetzler’s longstanding commitment to exhibiting the work of contemporary artists across generations.

Since 2018, André Butzer resides in California and continues his elementary explorations of colour, light, and pictorial scale. Yet, everything seems to be “seen anew”. His paintings virtually reinvent themselves. Some of them are now even titled again, often in the form of basic words such as “Pistachios”, “Barber Shop”, and “Lunch”. Everyday things, places and activities from which the mosaic of an American experience gradually forms itself.

Central to the selection of five recent paintings and one work on paper is English Muffins. In its visual abundance, the painting is just as overwhelming as it is ravishing. It encompasses the entire chromatic spectrum. Every hue, every state of colour is incorporated into this painterly simultaneity of escalation and serenity. Butzer keeps what is abstract and what is corporeal, what disintegrates and what assembles in a precarious balance.

English Muffins is accompanied by two paintings upon which coloured bands, together with metallic and flesh-like forms, ornamentally “create planes”, as well as by paintings of a single woman and a group. Planar pictorial figures gaining universal validity due to their iconic appearance, their reproducibility, and their accessibility.

Butzer’s latest paintings reveal all those polar opposites to be one single whole and realise a coherent conjunction of colours, lines, planes, figuration and abstraction.