André Butzer

Metro Pictures

New York, 519 West 24th Street

German painter André Butzer started his career creating particularly visceral and turbulent semi-figurative paintings of simple human encounters inspired by comics, contemporary life, and art history. Science-Fiction Expressionism is a term the artist coined to describe his painting practice in which dark humor meets with blazing colors and loose brushstrokes. In recent years, Butzer, who lives in Rangsdorf close to Berlin, inclined towards profoundly abstract monochrome paintings that rely on minimal geometric forms, reminiscing the structural paintings of Barnett Newman. 

André Butzer, Untitled, 2016 Oil on canvas  Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

Butzer’s solo exhibition at Metro Pictures introduces his exploration of abstraction in a committed and meditative approach, bringing together a series of oil on canvas paintings in which the arresting and potent impact of the color black prevails the surface. His N-Bilder (N-Pictures) series refers to limitless territory abstract painting perpetuates in contrast to visual demureness his black and white geometric forms may suggest at first sight. Challenging the set traditions of oil painting, works in this series articulate on the essence of working with the canvas and utilizing the limitless possibilities of the surface in the most unrestrained manner.

On view through March 11, 2017