André Butzer : Personal exhibitions

In 1996, Butzer co-founded the independent, self-governed Akademie Isotrop in Hamburg—a “revolutionary” artist collective that operated outside institutional frameworks. Its members educated one another through collaborative practice, organized public talks, held round tables and debates, published a magazine, and curated exhibitions across Germany, Austria, and England. Active until 2000, the Akademie played a formative role in shaping the contemporary art milieu and the development of its members' artistic practices.

Butzer’s artistic approach drew significantly from this collective experience. Early on, he engaged with the legacy of post-non-objectivism, as seen in the works of Albert Oehlen and Asger Jorn, advocating for the “renewal” of abstract painting. In his intense and often confrontational paintings, Butzer combines archetypal imagery with vivid historical references, amplifying the visual impact through a system of recurring pictorial signs. The distorted facial fragments and grimacing masks with hollow eyes recall early 20th-century caricature, while echoing the existential tension of Edvard Munch’s The Scream and the raw dynamism of Willem de Kooning’s Woman series.