Since the 1990s, André Butzer has been creating his own distinctive language through afusion of German expressionism and American pop culture, attempting to transcend theartistic, political, and social extremes of the 20th century: life and death, industrialisationand mass consumption. At the end of the 20th century, with the end of the Cold War and thesweep of industrialisation, Butzer exchanged with artists across generations, to fathom thelimitations of artistic thought from the past, and to explore the new possibilities of art.

André Butzer constructs his own methodology, ‘Science-Fiction Expressionism’, as a futuristicdescendant of traditional German expressionism. Confronting and embracing extremerealities, the artist used references ranging from corporate namesto cartoon characters earlyin his career to compress 20th-century cultural, political, and technological symbols intodistinctively dense paintings. Executed in a rough impasto technique, early works were aneffort to translate uncertain hope and desolation into unstable pictorial structures, which hehoped would lead to transcendent truths.

By creating a fictional utopian realm called NASAHEIM, the artist extends his attempts totouch transcendent realms such as colour and light, life and death, and truth. A combination ofthe names of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the cityAnaheim in California, where Disney Land is located, NASAHEIM is an idealised realm that isboth farther away than the space and deepest inner of us, where all extremes, longings, joys,and the horrors of history are balanced by reaching equality, and is a key element inunderstanding the artist’s world.

The iconic figures of André Butzer, crossing this exhibition, has been in constant evolutionsince the late 1990s, includes the woman who is a kind of guide, a benevolent figure like theVirgin Mary, the wanderer inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s novel ‘Hyperion’, and the’Friedens-Siemens’(Peace-Siemens), which represents a middle state of equality between the extremes of history. They emerge from the fused world of Butzer, who grew up simultaneouslywitnessing American popular culture and German postwar history and tradition, andtogether they embody a state of holistic balance.

Like a Matisse painting, the works are filled with a variety of light and colour that work inharmony to reveal the artist’s exploration of colour, light, proportion, and the potential ofpainterly expression. At the boundary between abstraction and figurative, the artist activates’Science-Fiction Expressionism’ to balance the colours and repeated contrasts in an attempt todeliver the ultimate expression of light and colour.

Constantly questioning the existential meaning and the validity of painting, André Butzer hasestablished a body of work with his own unique language. As the artist once said, the world isconcealed, and we hope that this solo exhibition will allow visitors to experience the hiddentruth of André Butzer’s paintings.