Art Calendar – Current Exhibitions in Germany

In 1980 the Einstürzende Neubauten released their album Stahlmusik, the Fehlfarben their Monarchie und Alltag (Monarchy and Daily Life), and DAF their single Kebab-Träume (Kebab Dreams). One year later Werner Büttner had his first solo exhibition at the Max Hetzler Art Gallery in Stuttgart. Like the musicians, Büttner has a foible for sardonic titles in particular and the German language in general. Like them, too, he likes to provoke and protest in his large-scale pictures that impetuously fluctuate between representation and abstraction – against hippies, against nature (and for concrete), against the glorification of individual artistic geniuses, against an elitist idea of art and all in all against everything that stands for fusty post-war Germany.

Büttner’s allies were Albert und Markus Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger and Georg Herold. Their paintings influenced not only the German art scene in the early 1980s, but also artists throughout Europe.

Some thirty years after Büttner’s first exhibition, the ZKM is now showing the largest exhibition of the artist to date, with about 300 pictures, drawings, collages and sculptures. Since 1989 Büttner, who was born in 1954 in Jena, has taught at the Hamburg Art Academy. His work has lost none of its mockery and mordancy over the years. In 2007, for instance, he painted Der romantische Imperativ (The Romantic Imperative), a picture of a greasy curried sausage floating before an idyllic woodland landscape. And Peter Weibel, who together with Andreas Beitin is the curator of the ZKM exhibition, certifies that Büttner “attacks everything and everyone, including himself and painting. [...] His works are ‘propaganda against everything’.”

The exhibition takes place in cooperation with the Weserburg – Museum for Modern Art in Bremen, where it will be on display from 26. October 2013 to 23 February 2014.