2023-06-25 06:00:39
The Thyssen Bornemisza museum in Madrid has set up a new space on its first floor that will now host exhibitions by contemporary artists, a proposal that began a few months ago with the exhibition dedicated to hyperrealism. To inaugurate this space the work of the German artist André Butzer has been chosen (Stuttgart, 1973), one of the best representatives of expressionism, a style of which the museum has works by Emil Nolde, Kirchner, Heckel and Max Pechstein in its permanent collection.
Educated at the Merz Akadeie in Stuttgart, the city where he was born, and in Hamburg, André Butzer founded his own academy to help train new artists. In this exhibition you can see some of the most recent paintings by André Butzer, painted between 1999 and 2022, in which an evolution can be seen from dark, gloomy and ghostly works (“ExHumans” and “H-Human”) to the use of color on a gray background in “Asesino” and “Caminante”, a work, the latter, with which he wanted to symbolize the shame of the Germans for their Nazi past. The ecstasy of color arrives with “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”, a work acquired by Blanca and Borja Thyssen for the museum.
In total there are 22 large-format works that offer a simultaneous explosion of colors to the simple linear representations of other of his paintings. In all of them, Butzer fuses expressionism and the influences of Cézanne and Munch with elements of American popular culture, such as Walt Disney comics (“Tom and Jerry”, “Untitled. Franzi”, “Munch interpreting Disney through naturalism”), to reach a very personal expressionism that he has baptized “science fiction”, with which he seeks to “transform the past into the future in optical terms”. By the way, “Franzi” has been painted by Butzer exclusively for this exhibition (it is a version of “Franzi before a carved chair” by Kirchner, a painting that is part of the Thyssen collection). And it is that for Butzer there is a strong connection between popular culture and high culturea relationship that he tries to expose in his works.
In his painting he also wants to represent the contradictions of contemporary Western society, in which mass consumerism and the destruction of the environment coexist with industrialization and technological progress. In his fictional spaces, such as “Nasaheim”, he combines utopia and consumerism, which he also reflects in “Untitled. Woman in front of house Nº4” and “Nasa Scarlatina”. TOndré Butzer projects his work towards the future while collecting the traditions of the past.
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