Exhibition Information

Exhibition view

(Image Source = The Page Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Image Source = The Page Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Image Source = The Page Gallery)

Exhibition view

(Image Source = The Page Gallery)

			The Page Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by German artist André Butzer from November 9 to December 30. This will be the first solo exhibition in Asia in three years and the first for Korean audiences since Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2020. The exhibition, which will be held at The Page Gallery East, consists of 15 major new works that span the artist's oeuvre over the past 30 years.

Since the 1990s, André Butzer has been creating his own distinctive language through a fusion of German expressionism and American pop culture, attempting to transcend the artistic, political, and social extremes of the 20th century: life and death, industrialization and mass consumption. At the end of the 20th century, with the end of the Cold War and the sweep of industrialization, Butzer exchanged with artists across generations, to fathom the limitations of artistic thought from the past, and to explore the new possibilities of art.

André Butzer constructs his own methodology, ‘Science-Fiction Expressionism’, as a futuristic descendant of traditional German expressionism. Confronting and embracing extreme realities, the artist used references ranging from corporate names to cartoon characters early in his career to compress 20th-century cultural, political, and technological symbols into distinctively dense paintings. Executed in a rough impasto technique, early works were an effort to translate uncertain hope and desolation into unstable pictorial structures, which he hoped would lead to transcendent truths.

By creating a fictional utopian realm called NASAHEIM, the artist extends his attempts to touch transcendent realms such as color and light, life and death, and truth. A combination of the names of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the city Anaheim in California, where Disney Land is located, NASAHEIM is an idealized realm that is both farther away than the space and deepest inner of us, where all extremes, longings, joys, and the horrors of history are balanced by reaching equality, and is a key element in understanding the artist's world.

The iconic figures of André Butzer, crossing this exhibition, has been in constant evolution since the late 1990s, includes the woman who is a kind of guide, a benevolent figure like the Virgin Mary, the wanderer inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin's novel ‘Hyperion’, and the ‘Friedens-Siemens’(Peace-Siemens), which represents a middle state of equality between the extremes of history. They emerge from the fused world of Butzer, who grew up simultaneously witnessing American popular culture and German postwar history and tradition, and together they embody a state of holistic balance.

Like a Matisse painting, the works are filled with a variety of light and color that work in harmony to reveal the artist's exploration of color, light, proportion, and the potential of painterly expression. At the boundary between abstraction and figurative, the artist activates ‘Science-Fiction Expressionism’ to balance the colors and repeated contrasts in an attempt to deliver the ultimate expression of light and color.

Constantly questioning the existential meaning and the validity of painting, André Butzer has established a body of work with his own unique language. As the artist once said, the world is concealed, and we hope that this solo exhibition will allow visitors to experience the hidden truth of André Butzer’s paintings.

André Butzer (B. 1973, Stuttgart), lives in Berlin-Wannsee. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in international institutions, including the Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen (2022); YUZ Museum, Shanghai, and Museum of the Light, Hokuto (both 2020); IKOB Musée d’Art Contemporain, Eupen (2018); Växjö Konsthall (2017); Bayerisches Armeemuseum, Ingolstadt, and Neue Galerie Gladbeck (2016); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2015); Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz (2014); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover, and Kunsthistorisches Museum / Theseustempel, Vienna (2011); Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2009); Kunstverein Ulm (2005) and Kunstverein Heilbronn (2004).

Works by André Butzer are held in the collections of prominent museums including Aurora Museum, Shanghai; Art Institute of Chicago; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York; Contemporary Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Faye G. Allen Centre for the Visual Arts, University of Washington, Seattle; Friedrichs Foundation, Weidingen / Bonn; Hall Art Foundation, Reading / VT | Derneburg; Hölderlinturm, Tübingen; IKOB Musée d’Art Contemporain, Eupen; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin State Museums, Berlin; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Marciano Art Collection, Los Angeles; MARe Museum, Bucharest; MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Museo Novecento, Florence; Nationalgalerie / Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Rubell Museum, Miami; YUZ Museum, Shanghai, among others.

(Source = The Page Gallery)