André Butzer is one of today’s most distinctive and influential painters. A self-proclaimed ‘colorist’, he is known for expressive and vibrantly colored paintings that fuse early European Expressionism with American popular culture. Despite evoking the raw strokes of Willem de Kooning, the approach to color of Edvard Munch, the cartoon-esque mark making of Philip Guston, the primitive renderings of Jean Dubuffet and the characters of Walt Disney, Butzer has formed a unique, artistic language comprised of his own system of characters and signs. “I stand on the shoulders of everyone. I am no modern phenomenon, coming out of nowhere. That would be terrible. (…) All belong together, all the paintings belong together. Rembrandt, all colors, fusions, potencies, repetitions, rhythms.” André Butzer states. Working in a style the artist self-coins as ‘Science Fiction Expressionism’, the artist’s body of work has progressed from chromatically-intense large scale figurative paintings rife with pop-culture references, to seemingly minimalist black and white abstract paintings. The substance of his artwork builds up on the accumulation of the extremes and contradictions of political events and art history of the 20th century. Always to some degree detached from reality, Butzer’s paintings and prints are yet fueled with the actual experiences he has made, the products and media he has consumed and the education he has received. Alluding to the influence mass consumption and popular culture have had on his life, André Butzer has described his artworks as “the kind of things Donald Duck would do when he paints”. His artwork has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Kestnergesellschaft (Hanover), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), Rubell Family Collection (Miami) and Kunsthalle Nuremberg. André Butzer was born in 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany, and lives and works in Altadena, California.
