Andre Butzer
Science fiction expressionism, and then eight years of paintings that are almost entirely black.
Andre Butzer was born in Stuttgart in 1973 and coined the term Science Fiction Expressionism for his own work: crowded, high-colour canvases of cartoonish figures he calls Friedens-Siemensen, painted in an invented world named NASAHEIM that folds together Walt Disney, Henry Ford, German history and the language of American abstraction. Between roughly 2010 and 2017 he stopped that entirely and made the N-Paintings, near-monochrome works in dense greys and blacks built from many layers, before returning to figures and colour. He has lived and worked between Berlin, Los Angeles and Brandenburg.
Which period a painting comes from is the first thing to establish, because the figurative works and the N-Paintings behave as two distinct markets and are priced quite differently. Scale is the next factor: Butzer paints very large, and the major canvases are substantially ahead of the small ones. The surfaces are thickly and unevenly built and are prone to drying cracks that are original to the work rather than damage, though they are frequently reported as damage. Works on paper are plentiful; editions are relatively few.
If you own a work by Andre Butzer
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