Ohne Titel (N-Krankheit). 2007.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in lower right. Signed and dated on the reverse. Inscribed "(Gebrannte Mandeln) N - Schweinstall" on the folded canvas in left and "Tödliche Wurstfabrik im Himmel (N)" on the folded canvas in right. 260 x 340 cm (102.3 x 133.8 in). [CH].

• Large-format, characteristic work with impasto and bright paint application.
• André Butzer develops his very own concept of art, with which he explores the fine line between figuration and abstraction.
• An artist full of contradictions: his works are dark, enigmatic and yet refreshingly colorful.
• Since 2005, the artist has devoted himself to an almost harmonious patchwork painting with echoes of Jackson Pollock's "dripping" and reminiscences of Willem de Kooning, Mark Tobey or the "Art brut" of Jean Dubuffet.
• With a wealth of symbols, hints of figurative and abstract shapes and gestural brushstrokes, Butzer creates complex compositions that he himself describes as "science fiction expressionism".
• The artist's works are part of important international collections, among them the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Charles Saatchi Collection, London, and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

The work will be included into the catalogue raisonné of paintings. We are grateful to Mr Christian Malycha, André Butzer Archive, for the kind support in cataloging this lot.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Bernd Kugler, Innsbruck.
Private collection North Rhine-Westphalian (acquired from the above in 2007).

EXHIBITION: PLAY. The Frivolous and the Serious, me Collectors Room, Berlin, May 16 - August 25, 2013.
André Butzer. Viele Tote im Heimatland - Fanta, Sprite, H-Milch, Mickey und Donald (Gemälde 1999-2009), Kunsthalle Nürnberg at KunstKulturQuartier, Nuremberg, June 18 - August 23, 2009, pp. 98f. (full-page color illu.).

"Utopias are known to have no place. They cannot be realized. Except in art. And that itself is a utopia that cannot be realized. [..] I simply have certain images in my head. And when I see them and at the same time see seeing with them, I achieve clarity. It is night in my pictures . I see machines, assembly lines, Fordism. There is life and flesh and serial destruction. The meat is moved on belts. It circulates as a commodity. Life is a terrible contradiction. Painting struggles with this contradiction. It consists of flesh and air. It is body and atmosphere. And in the atmosphere, of course, there is also water. That's why meat and lemonade are my symbols for painting. Lemonade is the industrialized, sugared water that surrounds the body, cola is the water that dissolves meat. [..] N is the unrealizable pictorial measure. I need such constructs in order to get somewhere. I don't see myself as a painter. I want to get somewhere through art. I want to become someone else. And N has accompanied me all these years as a size, as a measure, as a letter, as a number, as a formula and as a place. [..]. N describes the threshold to the picture, but not the picture itself. N prevents the purely pictorial from spreading in art. N is rather a measure of the possibility of the picture, not of its reality. But because most pictures only know the form of reality, they are so boring."
André Butzer in a talk with Michael Stoeber, in: André Butzer. Ich putze so lange, bis die Dinge leuchten, Kunstforum, vol. 218 (Der urbane Blick), 2012, pp. 234-243.