André Butzer "Nicht fürchten! Don´t be scared!"
Metro Pictures
This event has ended.
André Butzer's second New York show at Metro Pictures "Nicht fürchten! Don´t be scared!" features a group of new, closely related works that focus on the "formal event" of painting. By emphasizing shapes and fields of color, these works possess a less linear take on the usual motifs in his work—colorful hybrids of abstraction and cartoon figuration featuring a family of characters inspired by art history, comics, politics and animation. Both sinister and amusing, these elegant compositions balance large, vaguely recognizable biomorphic forms within chaotic, multicolored backgrounds or heavily textured monochromatic fields.
"Blue Smurf" presents the most identifiable image in the exhibition with the cartoon character embedded in a complex field of thick paint—the Smurf's wry smile acknowledges his victory over abstraction. In the reductive "Entombment of Winnie the Pooh" a Pooh-yellow blob is taken to his grave in the night; a sacrificial pop martyr intended to unite art history. "Favorite Painting of Paul Cezanne" and "Aladdin and the Magic Oil Lamp" balance Butzer's use of maximal, colorful abstraction and a newfound spatiality to celebrate the Post-Impressionist master and to "have something truly colorful and tender like a big Disney movie", respectively.
Media
Schedule
from April 01, 2010 to May 01, 2010