BUTZER, ANDRÉ
1973 Stuttgart

Title: "Das große Mädchen".
Date: 2002.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 250 x 201 cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: A. Butzer. Verso lower left signed and dated: A. Butzer '02. Verso centre titled: ‘Das große Mädchen’ (März). Here additionally equipped with directional arrow.



Provenance:
- - Private Collection North Germany


Exhibition:
- Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2002


Literature:
- Holzwarth, Hans Werner: André Butzer, Cologne 2021, no. 52, ill.

- Exhib. cat. Offene Haare, offene Pferde: Amerikanische Kunst 1933–45, Kölnischer Kunstverein, 2002, p. 3, ill.



- André Butzer is one of the most internationally recognised and sought-after German artists of his generation

- Early work in his characteristic expressive style with a high degree of recognisability

- Butzer himself describes his art as "Science Fiction Expressionism"



Career and Influences

André Butzer, born in Stuttgart in 1973, is regarded as one of the most significant contemporary painters of our time. Following brief periods of study at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, he co-founded the autonomous artist collective Akademie ISOTROP (1996–2000) in 1996 together with Jonathan Meese and others, which simultaneously functioned as an experimental teaching institute. In 2001, he founded the Institut für SDI-Traumforschung in Berlin together with Björn Dahlem.

Among Butzer’s earliest and most formative influences are the works of Asger Jorn, through which he first came to painting and which have remained central to his extensive body of work throughout his life. Yet figures as diverse as Walt Disney, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford have also served as points of reference. Today, Butzer’s works are exhibited not only in Germany but internationally. Earlier this year, the gallery representing the artist, Galerie Max Hetzler, presented a major solo exhibition of his new works in Berlin.



Science-Fiction Expressionism – Exploring the Boundary Between Figuration and Abstraction

In his early large-scale works, Butzer fused European Expressionism with American postwar painting—an approach he himself describes as “Science-Fiction Expressionism.” By this, Butzer means “(...) a painterly practice and pictorial world that merges past and future, thereby leading through a secular hell into a heaven of color.” (cf. Larissa Kikol, André Butzer. Malerei ist ein Friedhof, also eine sehr zukünftige Angelegenheit, Kunstforum International, vol. 263, 2019).

These are expressive, naively grotesque compositions in which elements of comic and pop culture intersect with references to everyday life and history. Figurative and abstract motifs coexist and intermingle. In this way, André Butzer developed a highly distinctive visual language: he investigates the dissolution of the figure, deformation, and typification, probing the threshold between figuration and abstraction. The human body serves as a point of departure for the artist’s entirely singular universe of forms.



The Unique Materiality of Color in Butzer’s Early Works

The monumental painting presented here depicts a standing female figure rendered in vivid, expressive colors that occupy the entire pictorial field. Suggested in half-profile, she appears to raise her arms in a dancing, swaying movement. The hand of the right arm seems to wave toward the viewer, while the left arm takes on an almost phallic appearance. Nose, mouth, and eyes are sketched in black. Dressed in a patterned garment composed of varying colors, the chest area stands out through a knot-like concentration of forceful brushstrokes.

The work is particularly distinguished by Butzer’s characteristic dynamic and expressive brushwork: traces of the brush remain visible, the application of paint is predominantly flat, and volume emerges primarily through strong contrasts and contours. This painterly manner emphasizes the materiality and corporeality of paint rather than its decorative effect.

Through its impasto application of color, visible gestures of the brush, and expressive contours oscillating between cartoon-like figuration and expressionist visual language, this remarkable painting stands as a quintessential example of Butzer’s work from the early 2000s.



Iconic Motifs in André Butzer’s Wor

Alongside the “Cat,” the “Friedens-Siemens” (a benevolent, head-like being), and the “Schandenmensch” (a hybrid between The Scream and the SS skull emblem), the “Woman” has been one of Butzer’s central motifs since 2002.

The comparatively understated title, Das große Mädchen (The Big Girl), stands in sharp contrast to the rapid, sketch-like execution and the grotesque depiction of the figure. In doing so, the painting deliberately unsettles the viewer and resists any singular or definitive interpretation.



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