Hollybush Gardens at Art Statements with Our Colours are the Colours of the Market Place by Andrea Büttner
Art Statements | Art Basel | 15–19 June | S17
Daily 11–7 pm
For Art Statements Hollybush Gardens presents Our Colours are the Colours of the Market Place by Andrea Büttner, a presentation of ongoing research into notions of poverty in art and religion and the relationship of art and shame. Taking the title from a screen print by Sister Cortia Kent, the display considers the notion of the market place in all its forms, as well as reflecting on the spectacle of the art fair.
For the first time, Büttner articulates her interest in shame in a very direct way. A corner bench, connects to a new woodcut of a grey corner Corner (grey), 2011. A sound work features Büttner reading text fragments from screen prints by Sister Corita. A monitor shows a video focusing on the hands of a supermarket checkout worker. On the floor is a clay sculpture Ahnenknödel (ancestor dumplings, 2011). The sculpture deals with caring for and of – of art as a potentiality, actively affirming the feminist legacy of post minimalism. Poverty is studied through the paradigm of fabric where a series of ‘fabric paintings’ made of material used for worker uniforms hint both at monochrome painting and the multilayered socio economic connotations of labour and fabrication.
Büttner considers the unstable status of artistic expression, exploring the thresholds between failure and recognition, between the intimacy of artistic production and the public surrender of exhibiting. These strategies are resolutely situated in the tradition of conceptual practices of the 60s and 70s – whilst departing from them no less resolutely. Turning to the visual and the pictorial, the figurative and the narrative, the subjective and handmade, the retrieval of these forms of expression in Büttner’s work does not entail a regression to the mythologies of the past. Rather her return to anachronistic motifs and rhetoric enable Büttner to break through the established languages of critique and reopen art’s self-enquiry. The affirmative statement by Corita brings to the fore an important aspect of Büttner’s practice – the critical potential of affirmation, alluding to the context of the market of which the art fair is an established form.
Andrea Büttner is based in both London and Frankfurt and holds a PHD from the Royal College of Art, London. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Artpace, San Antonio (July, 2011), a solo show at Hollybush Gardens London,(Feb 2012), and a solo show at MMK Zollamt Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Feb 2012). She is the 2010 Max Mara Prize winner culminating in The Poverty of Riches at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (March 2011), A selection of this show will be on view at the Maramotti Collection in Reggio Emilia, Italy from November 2011. She has recently been included in Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar (There is always a cup of sea to sail in), 29th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil and Unto This Last, Raven Row, London both 2010.
Contact Lisa Panting or Malin Ståhl for further information: +44 (0) 739 9651,+44 (0)7968754967, or email: office@hollybushgardens.co.uk
Hollybush Gardens
Unit 2, BJ House
10-14 Hollybush Gardens
London E2 9QP, UK
+44(0)2077399651
