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André Butzer


André Butzer, Ohne Titel, 2022, Acryl auf Leinwand, 70 × 50 cm / 27.5 × 19.6 in., courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin | Paris | London © 2023: André Butzer, Foto: def image

 28 April 2023 until 27 August 2023

Gallery Weekend 28.-30. April, 2023, 11am – 7 pm


Opening hours: Saturdays 12 – 6 pm


Guided tours:

Sat, 10 June, 3-4pm
Sat, 8 July, 3-4 pm
Sat, 19 August, 3-4 pm


Signing in for the guided tours by Email: info@miettinen-collection.de

Timo Miettinen is exceedingly glad to host a special show arranged by André Butzer, on the occasion of the painter’s 50th birthday birthday in June 2023, including more than 20 mostly never shown before works, 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.

André Butzer’s painting embodies the recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence. The fateful Wanderer walks the earth, homeless and full of longing for his own place, both as witness and perpetrator of the man-made devastation and horrors. A late offspring of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, he might well be an alter ego or even self-portrait of the artist (and then again not at all). The figure of the Woman resides at the center of Butzer’s painting. On the brink of this world and the beyond, she lingers in a tense state of vulnerable powerlessness and rigorous capability. Modest and benevolent, she could even be an icon of the Virgin Mary, re-uniting what is present and what is absent: Imprints of death and traces of the living.

From the elementary relation between the horizontal and the vertical, Butzer has created a pictorial figure that inevitably reveals the finiteness as well as the possibilities of being in his so-called N-Paintings (2010–2017). In this tremendous condition of imageless immediacy, each of them is unique, unrepeatable, individual, constantly questioning our wavering stand in the world. Seen together, all N-Paintings form a threshold that »is not corporeal and at the same time still appears to be corporeal«. Completely disconcerting but completely human: broken, ashamed and overwhelmed, upright, composed and steadfast.

For the first time painted on canvas, four paintings spread out individual dabs or spots of color. They modulate and shift the primary colors, red, yellow and blue together with added flesh tones. They lay bare the building blocks as well as the coloristic and historical heritage of Butzer’s paintings, which are neither merely figurative nor merely abstract but complete beings of the unison and presence of color. Figures and colors alike are interwoven and solidified. Every layer, block or patch of color coheres with the directions of the canvas. Contrary to their opulent dispersion, all expressive marks mutually resonate with one another and thereby create the delicate balance of the painterly whole.

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 (April 27–30, 2023).

Visits are possible every Saturday between 12:00 and 18:00.