André Butzer describes his work as "abstract art" and titled his exhibition at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover in 2011 "Probably the best abstract painter in the world", although many of his works deal with basically figurative image content. At a young age, he was particularly enthusiastic about the works of Asger Jorn (1914-1973), through which he finally found his way to painting. Together with Jonathan Meese and other artists, Butzer founded the "Akademie Isotrop" in Hamburg in 1996, an artist group that also functions as an art teaching institute. In the years that followed, Butzer found his very own approach to art: he often created large-format works in which the artist dealt with the dissolution of the figure in pictorial space, with deformation and typification, and in doing so explored the astonishingly narrow boundary between figuration and abstraction.
Today, André Butzer's works are part of numerous renowned collections, including the collection of contemporary art of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, the print room of the State Museums in Berlin, the Goetz Collection in Munich, but also international collections such as the London Saatchi Gallery, the MoCA , Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. [EH]