10 Jan 2018

André Butzer at IKOB - Museum of Contenporary Art - Eupen

André Butzer (*1973 in Stuttgart, Germany) is today considered to be one of the most influential artists of his generation. He is known to the public also under the names N-Hölderlin, Henry Butzer or Calvin Cohn. Influenced by Art Brut, Naive Art and especially by Expressionism, he develops his own style of painting known as 'Science Fiction Realism'. The powerful and colourful works bear witness to Butzer's intensive investigation of painting, which he seeks to push to the limits of its possibilities. They can be seen as naive abstraction or autodidactic painting – everything is possible – but his art is not supposed to be moralizing or indoctrinating. The reduced abstraction of his black pictures, on the other hand, evolved into a further painterly attitude, a decision to usher painting back to itself.

In his first solo exhibition in Belgium, Butzer is presenting an overview of the recent decades of his still-young artistic output. The fundamental argument of this exhibition involves the omissions – both painterly and narrational – that are manifested in his works. It is precisely these gaps that facilitate visitors' own production of fantasy and create space for speculation. With this retrospective, André Butzer is inaugurating the new exhibition year at the IKOB under the concepts of pragmatism and self-organization.