DUSSELDORF.- Under the programmatic title No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion, the internationally renowned artist Andrea Büttner (b. 1972 in Stuttgart) has developed a site-specific exhibition for K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. On view are new works created especially for this presentation as well as works from the recent past.

For more than twenty years, the artist, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017, has been dealing with complex themes: shame, poverty, work, and the practices of religious communities, as well as the historical continuities of right-wing ideologies in the ecology movement and the fetishization of craftsmanship, which she explores in a field of tension between aesthetic and ethical questions. Andrea Büttner uses a wide range of media, including large-format woodcuts, paintings, drawings, video installations, silkscreen prints, textiles, and glass objects.

With their resistant aesthetics, the works of Andrea Büttner combine small, seemingly insignificant things with existential themes and dig into our consciousness. She takes a close look at value creation processes and systems of enrichment in the worlds of consumption and art, as well as at the art history of poverty and the questionable search for healing through art. Her approach is conceptual. In apparent contradiction to this, however, she works with art techniques in which particular importance is attached to manual labor and devotion to materials.

Andrea Büttner would like her presentation in the three rooms of the Bel Etage to be understood as both a review and a new orientation. In the first exhibition room, she critically examines an alleged healing through art. With a series of works, she argues against the concern conveyed in many exhibitions of recent years to overcome trauma through art, architecture, or religion. Instead, she focuses on uncovering, showing, and continually questioning hidden and repressed wounds and voids, as well as their immediate relevance to the present. Her call for an informed awareness of history takes form, for example, in the photographic series depicting the gridded foundations of overgrown planting beds: Beetfun- damente der Plantage und des “Kräutergartens,” die von der SS im Konzentrationslager Dachau für biologisch-dynamische Agrarforschung genutzt wurden (Former plant beds from the plantation and “herbal garden,” used by the SS for biodynamic agricultural research, at the Dachau Concentration Camp, 2019/23). Here, anti-modernist currents and National Socialist continuities in the ecology movement come to the fore. Andrea Büttner’s new video work Coventry Cathedral (2023) is being shown for the first time. Coventry’s Gothic cathedral was destroyed by German air raids in 1940 and now exists only as a ruined shell. The new St. Michael’s Cathedral, built in 1962, serves as an offering of consolation and a worldwide symbol of peace. In the video Büttner considers "the trauma of modernity through beautiful design.” The second video work, Liberty and Morris: Simple Life and so on (2018), also presented publicly for the first time, concerns William Morris, a key figure of anti-modernism in art history. Here, too, Andrea Büttner’s work goes beyond the question of how design and politics are connected as she addresses the supposedly human warmth of anti-modern aesthetics.

Poverty is the central theme of the second exhibition space. Here, among other things, the large-format woodcuts from the nine-part, monochrome black series Beggar (2016) are juxtaposed with materials from the Warburg Institute in London and working papers by the art historian Linda Nochlin on the representation of poverty in art. Andrea Büttner pairs her depictions of shrouded bodies with outstretched hands begging for alms—condensed in a few strokes into haunting, pathos-filled expressions formulas— with art historical depictions of beggars reproduced in auction house catalogues. The latter are from the Warburg Institute’s Photographic Collection. The backs of the catalogue pages bear references to the sales, revealing a striking contrast between the images of poverty and their value on the art market. Since 2003, and especially in her dissertation on Perspectives on Shame and Art, which she submitted to the Royal College of Art in London in 2008, Andrea Büttner has been concerned with the thematic complex of shame and—related to this—with visibility and invisibility, with poverty and humiliation, as well as with Christian notions of humility of “smallness.” It is against this background that her fascination with mosses as so-called lower plants can be understood. The complex organism, which is difficult to keep alive in the air-conditioned exhibition rooms protected from UV light, is handed over to the museum’s care in the form of a moss-covered stone. It is both an amorphous beauty and a precarious organism.

At the center of the third exhibition space is the newly developed installation Schamstrafen (Shame Punishments, 2022/23), with historical images of the public humiliation of people in different centuries and contexts. Presented in such a way that the motifs are barely visible, we are confronted with the question of how to legitimately deal with images of humiliation, including those we are familiar with today from social media networks. Her double slide projection Kunstgeschichte des Bückens (Art History of Bending) (2021/23) gathers art historical representations of socially undervalued physical activities, mostly attributed to women (field work or domestic work). Again, drawing on the richness of art history, Büttner links these themes to a political agenda. The connection between poverty labor and exploitation, as evidenced in her woodcuts from the series Erntende (Harvesters) (2021), created during the pandemic,extends beyond the historical context to the present: During the Corona pandemic, for example, seasonal workers from abroad were exposed to an increased risk of disease in group quarters so that the German population, who had retreated to their private homes, could enjoy asparagus. In Büttner’s work, the task of harvesting asparagus is linked to the question of the value of manual labor in general—in society as well as in art.

Curator: Isabelle Malz

The exhibitions on the Bel Etage are sponsored by the Foundation for Art, Culture, and Social Projects of Sparda-Bank West.

Andrea Büttner (b. 1972 in Stuttgart) lives and works in Berlin and is Professor of Art in the Contemporary Context at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. She received her PhD from the Royal College of Art in London and previously studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts.

Her solo exhibitions include Der Kern der Verhältnisse / The Heart of Relations, Kun- stmuseum Basel (2023); Andrea Büttner, Kunstverein München, Munich (2019); Shepherds and Kings, Bergen Kunsthall (2018); Andrea Büttner, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Beggars and iPhones, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); Andrea Büttner, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2015); Andrea Büttner, Tate Britain, London (2014); Andrea Büttner, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014); and Andrea Büttner, MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2013). She participated in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012) and the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018). Büttner was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017 and received the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2009.

She is represented in numerous collections of international art institutions, including the Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Museum Cardiff, Wales; the MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Lenbachhaus, Munich; the Kunstmuseum Bonn; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Kunsthaus Zürich; the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff; and the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.