Andrea Büttner

Walker Art Center is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States of German artist Andrea Büttner (b. 1972). Throughout her installations and exhibitions, Büttner consistently embraces a range of printmaking and print techniques, from woodcut and screenprints to offset printing and a recent foray into etching, including a new series made expressly for the exhibition. By deploying reverse glass painting, sculpture, collage, the moving image, photography, textile, and including other artists’ work in her exhibitions, Büttner traverses mediums, materials, and social subjects enabled by her deep engagement with the printed image. Her practice intertwines art historical concepts with social and political issues, often exploring such unfashionable connections as the relationship between art and religion, deviance and ethics, or shame and visual expression. 

Presenting existing work alongside newly commissioned work, Andrea Büttner includes a pivotal series of 11 large off-set prints culled from her book-length visual exploration of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1790 text Critique of the Power of Judgment (published last year by Felix Meiner Verlag and Museum Ludwig, Cologne). This presentation of “Kant’s pictures” features composite digital illustrations, mixing historical images the philosopher may have had in mind while writing his treatise with contemporary image constellations configured by the artist as reader, interpreter, and questioner. 

The installation also features a range of new works, including a living moss sculpture, handcrafted piano benches, large-scale woodcuts, and etchings that capture and transpose the smear and blur of fingerprints left on cell phone screens. Creating connections between art history, ethics, and the vulnerability of the human body, Andrea Büttner explores and challenges the belief systems that underpin such foundational notions as poverty, shame, and value. Through deploying a wide range of premodernist media, the artist restores outmoded methods to our time in order to provoke and challenge conventions of high and low, constructing a profound space between ornate and humble, cool remove and humility, and the urge to judge or remain partially withheld. 

Art historian, curator, and writer Lars Bang Larsen will join Andrea Büttner and Fionn Meade for an opening day in-gallery conversation on Saturday, November 21.  

Andrea Büttner is complemented by a separate presentation of Andrea Büttner’s multi-channel video installation Piano Destructions (2014), on view from November 21, 2015 to May 15, 2016 in Medtronic Gallery. 

Exhibition curator: Fionn Meade 

About the artist
Born in Stuttgart in 1972, Andrea Büttner received her MFA from the University of the Arts, Berlin, her MA in art history and philosophy from Humboldt University, Berlin, and her PhD from the Royal College of Art, London, where she wrote a thesis on the relationship between art and shame. Büttner has been featured in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Hollybush Gardens, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as well as the Banff Centre in Canada, the National Museum Cardiff in Wales, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, among others. In 2009, Büttner was the recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and her work was featured in Documenta 13. Büttner currently lives and works in London and Frankfurt.

Funding
The exhibition is made possible by generous support from Franklin Art Works, Linda and Larry Perlman, and RBC Wealth Management.