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Museum shows Büttner’s joy of painting
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“ Fool, Leaving the Shelter of Seclusion,” a major survey exhibition of Werner Büttner, one of Germany’s most influential artists, is held at Yuz Museum in Shanghai through June 22.
It is Büttner’s first institutional solo exhibition in Asia.
Organized by Yuz Museum in close collaboration with the artist and the curator Thomas Eller, the exhibition features 46 artworks — 39 paintings and seven sculptures, rendering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career spanning from 1979 to 2024.
Born in Jenain in 1954, Büttner is a key figure on the German art scene of the late 20th century. With his close friends, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, Büttner formed a strong presence, emerging in the late 1970s, projecting a sense of humor that was intended to shake up and fuse an art scene steeped in rigid conceptualism.
Their “joy of (bad) painting” became an inspiration for a new generation of artists and “electrified” a whole generation of younger painters such as Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, both today’s heavyweight names in the history of contemporary art.
Büttner also left his influence on many of his Chinese students who went to Hamburg.
Some say that if Büttner hadn’t chosen to be an artist, he would have been one of the most famous writers. His field of interest is extremely wide. From the myths of early nomadic cultures to the skepticism of Montaigne’s “Essais,” the artist has devoured Western philosophy and grand literature, not as an academic, but for personal use and as a means of developing his own personality.
At first sight of his paintings, viewers might feel a bit perplexed. He often uses metonymic strategies or metaphors. Images become shields that protect and insulate the factual, or emotional, core from the harshness of reality. This has become his artistic methodology and visual language.
His art often shows two key things: a sharp irony that warns you not to trust what you see and a strong need to keep meaning alive, even though that can be risky.
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