Description |
Our continuing partnership with Marlborough Contemporary focuses on Hamburg-based artist Werner Büttner, with this the first substantial book to be published on the artist's work in English. Büttner is best known for drawing out deeper layers of meaning from daily scenes out of life that, at first glance, may seem banal. Büttner's large-scale neo-Expressionist and neo-Dadaist paintings and enlarged colour print collages address social ills with a biting and wry humour. In doing so, Büttner uses all genres of painting, including the still life, self-portraiture, and history painting. Büttner was born in Jena, Thüringen in 1954 and achieved prominence in the early 1980s as one of the Jungen Wilden , a group that included Martin Kippenberger, and the brother Albert and Markus Oehlen. In contrast to the then dominant minimal conceptual and video art, they produced expressive figurative paintings that have been described as a politically motivated realism. Büttner's work has continued to be marked by irony and critical distance, with its import often amplified by his combination of words and images. In 1960, Büttner's family fled from the GDR to West Germany, and his experience of two opposed political systems has provided him with the advantage of being able to look at both with a degree of scepticism. In his use of collage, and his combination of the everyday and the commonplace in his work, this sceptical perspective becomes manifest as a critical method. With cutting wit, Büttner breaks the spell of daily social events and renders their values relative and benign. Werner Büttner lives and works in Geesthacht. Since 1989 he has been Professor of Painting at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. |