Curated by Ellen Seifermann
Since the late 1990s, German painter André Butzer has been tinkering away in his thick, expressionistic impasto to create an alternate universe populated by such curious figures as the death-faced Wanderers and ungainly augurs of good fortune, the Friedens-Siemense (named after the multinational corporation). Butzer, with disarming irony, describes his work as “science fiction expressionism”—locating the orbits of Asger Jorn and Albert Oehlen within waving distance. The Kunsthalle Nürnberg now opens its galleries to this radical (anti-)vision of the world with a concentrated selection of large-format paintings from the past decade. Judging from the show’s subtitle—“Many Die in the Homeland: Fanta, Sprite, UHT Milk, Mickey and Donald!”—Butzer’s own strain of dadaist absurdism will no doubt surface both visually and linguistically.
