Always There

Fusing European Expressionism with American popular culture, André Butzer (b. 1973, Stuttgart) has painted his way through the artistic and political extremes of the 20th century – life, death, consumption and mass entertainment – into the 21st century. With wide ranging influences including Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, as well as Walt Disney and Henry Ford, Butzer has developed a unique and elaborate fictitious universe.

Many iconic characters have come to populate Butzer’s ‘Science Fiction-Expressionism’ with their recognisable large comic-book eyes, inflated heads or oversized hands. First appearing in 1999, these bright figures and shapes continue to lure the viewer in subsequent bodies of work. Engaging with the fundamental dimensions of colour, light and painterly expression, Butzer’s practice has shifted through the seemingly utter blackness of his N-Paintings, to a return to vibrancy, following his move to California between 2018 to 2021. Painting en plein air year-round, these recent works vibrate with a bold, energetic force.

Over a career spanning five decades, Günther Förg (1952–2013) developed a distinctive and prolific body of work, including experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting, against the general trend of figurative painting predominant in Germany in the 1980s. Wall paintings, sculptures, large format photographs, portraits and architectural views, as well as drawings and graphics, executed in a range of mediums, bear witness to the innovative diversity of the artist’s approach. Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work. From the late 2000s, Förg’s painting took a brighter and more gestural turn, resulting from an intuitive approach to colour and composition.  

‘Art, artists, architecture, landscapes, films and literature are all constant sources of inspiration for Günther Förg, and the notion that art is generally more likely to be derived from other art than from nature comes through in his various work cycles and series as well. His spontaneity of conception and dynamic gesture is contrasted with complex references and their associated meanings. Förg is concerned with self-reflecting experience and self-analysis in painting. By referring to the most diverse of artists from widely varying eras and styles of the 20th century, he brings out individual positions that were arguably of unparalleled relevance to artistic practice in subsequent decades, while at the same time he links periods and ideologies that were often mutually contradictory.’

B. Reiss, Günther Förg: Paintings, Walls, and Photographs in Günther Förg 1987–2011, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2012

Over the course of three decades, Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968) has produced a diverse oeuvre which pushes the boundaries of visual language. Encompassing painting, drawing and sculpture, his multimedia practice foregrounds the tensions and intersections between the abstract and figurative divide. The artist works in distinctive series with a meticulous, almost obsessive drive. Treading the line between geometry and gesture, Grotjahn has developed a unique pictorial lexicon that is at once idiosyncratic and continually evolving. Since his initial ‘Sign Exchange’ project (1993–1998), the artist has gone on to create his renowned series of ‘Butterfly’ paintings (2001–); ‘50 Kitchens’ (2013–2018); ‘Face’ (2003–); his sculptural body of ‘Masks’ (2000–); and more recently the ‘Capri’ (2016–) and 'Backcountry' (2021–) paintings, among others. Comprising angular motifs, a capricious sense of symmetry, reductive sculptural forms, a vibrant palette, and rich impasto paint in his dynamic opus of work, Grotjahn seeks to challenge and upturn the hermetic structures of artistic production.

‘At the centre of Grotjahn’s practice is a belief in formalism – the idea that paintings can be self-contained, and derive from continual experimentation in medium and form. He has spoken widely on his love for the non-objective – distinct from abstract art, which literally means to “take out”, or detract. Instead, Grotjahn relies on painting to build systems and structures which have no external reference point. This is made abundantly clear by his speaking on the subject: […] Grotjahn invokes and withdraws comparisons to real life objects, telling the viewers “I called some ‘butterflies’ but I don’t think they are butterflies; I call my sculptures ‘masks’ but they are not masks.”’

L. Earthy, ‘Mark Grotjahn’s Waking Formalism’, Emergent Magazine, September 2022

Frank Nitsche (b. 1964) has developed a sophisticated visual language, overlapping layers of paint on top of one another, intersecting lines and creating specific forms. Geometric figures, lines and shapes are reduced to abstract formations reminiscent of construction plans, technical models, designs, calligraphy or computer programmes. To work on his abstract compositions, Nitsche makes use of a large visual archive taken from media, pop and consumer culture which he arranges, selects and condenses into his own pictorial idiom; his ‘albums’ are published as artists books or exhibited next to the paintings.

‘Nitsche exclusively develops his typically distorted and intertwined planar formalisations during the painting process – without any computer assistance, but nevertheless intentionally including a general aesthetic of medialisation in the paintings. In his opinion “all aspects of social life are designed. I understand my work”, says Nitsche, “as the resume and essence of all design, so to say, the deformed design of the zeitgeist, the over-design and the distortion of the over-design”. In this respect the scintillatingly compact, evocatively synthetic character of the paintings also harbours social-critical reflections. [...] Nitsche applies a unique pictorial logic to the development of every one of his paintings. For him there is no seriality; not even the formats are standardised. He enters the painting process completely: positioning a form, reacting to it in subsequent steps, obliterating existing parts, overpainting, complementing, erasing further parts, overpainting again, and so on. He continues this until a structure exists with the desired tension, rigour and dynamics.’

J. Asthoff, Into the Green in Frank Nitsche: Green, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2006

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

A central tenet of Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) practice is the very process of painting itself. This has been explored and developed since his early years through reducing form and colour, as well as experimenting with different painting styles and reproduction techniques, such as silkscreen or pattern rollers, overlaying and erasing, covering or obscuring with paint, and adding layers on top. The range of techniques Wool has used over the years makes reference to the processes and gestures that have marked contemporary art history. The artist's complex work encourages the viewer to reflect on the physical qualities of paint and various modes of reproduction, while honing an awareness of painting procedures and the essential elements of the medium: colour, form and line.

‘Christopher Wool’s paintings seem to capture visual urban experience, carved out of a moment for the duration of an artwork – an artwork that coverts the structures of experience into the structures of painting. Non-specific moments and impressions are lifted out of context and fixed into details of a painting that, unlike graffiti, conveys the speed and concentration of its origin only when it is contemplated over a measure of time in an art space. The dynamic of the picture’s conception becomes, very gradually, the dynamite of the thought it contains. Thought pictures.’

F. Meschede, ‘The Nothingness before nothing’ in Christopher Wool, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2007