André Butzer

‘As Butzer’s last pieces make abundantly clear, the object of his practice has never been to defang the power of painting. The very opposite is true. In the newest series we see that the line has finally transformed from the explosive chicken-scratch of some of the earlier works to the resonant, fully active fields that now swell and tilt before our eyes with an internal energy that feels real in the kind of way only a successful abstraction can deliver.
We may never have seen these paintings before, but it feels as though we have, or, at least, as though we should have. For my part, I have always believed that you know you have done something good when it looks like it has always been around, like it is so obvious you wonder why nobody ever thought of it before. What we have definitely not seen are canvases like these painted in such an obsessive/compulsive pseudo-serial manner – each one, despite their similarities, actually unique.’

D. Mendel-Black, ‘Mature Works’, in André Butzer, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2013, pp. 5–6