André Butzer
Librairie du 21e Siècle: André Butzer (5a)
2011
Digital print
100 x 150 cm
Photograph by Steffen Krüger, Rangsdorf
Acquired in 2016
On private view in room no. 601.
André Butzer (b. 1973), who came to international attention more than 15 years ago for his audaciously colored and thickly slathered paintings of cartoonish figures, is now increasingly focused on abstract painting. In 2010, he started an ongoing series that explored the maximum potential of paintings through apparently reductive means. His work presented within The Emblem Collection is part of what he calls "The library project” – a series of photographs about books. The one he chose to show here is Piet Mondrian on the back of a Taschen-book and a German book about the Alps. Given Butzer's interests in pioneers of modern painting and the avant-garde, his choice of Mondrian is not accidental. Even though his usage of photography is unusual, the print exists as the only original, which negates the reproducibility of photography and draws back to the rules of painting. On the contrary, Butzer's recent painting efforts are devoted to reproduction and repetitiveness, drawing back to the rules of photography. In his recent paintings, as with the “The library project”, the importance is the empty gap between the pictures or colors on the canvas. It is there – in between – where the meaning is produced (in between Piet Mondrian’s face and the landscape of Alps). This is the place where the story dwells.
