28 Mar 2008 to 3 May 2008
Hours : Tues - Sat 10 - 6pm
Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street
NY 10011
New York, NY
New York
North America
p: +1 212 206 7100
m:
f: +1 212 337 0070
w: www.metropicturesgallery.com
Andr� Butzer Untitled (Frau), 2007, Oil on canvas
Andr� Butzer March 28 - May 3 2008 Opening: March 27, 6-8 pm
For his New York debut, Andr� Butzer will show 12 new brilliantly-colored paintings that survey the ongoing motifs of his work. Butzer�s paintings reference German and American history, culture and politics (both historical and contemporary), art history, science fiction, comics and animation.
The four large figure paintings in the first gallery integrate Butzer�s family of familiar characters with enhanced, exaggerated styles of abstract painting. The cartoon-like figures with their signature heads�Frau, Wanderer, Roter Man (Edvard Munch), and Heinrich Butzer�were invented in honor of Walt Disney and Edvard Munch. The characters are embedded and submerged in bright, thick, gestural paint superimposed with linear markings.
The main room holds three large paintings in varying degrees of abstraction. In the 30-foot long painting, a crowd of Butzer�s disembodied head types�death mask, the scream, smiley face, grimacing blob�vie for space amidst a spectral field of chaotic fiercely-applied paint that is brushed, splashed, sprayed and dripped. Another of the paintings, where abstraction seems to have won the battle, is an explosion of thick masses of color that merge with shapes and forms which are only obscurely identifiable. The third painting is a field of thickly-layered gray tones, overlaid with graffiti of sparse lines in pure color.
The paintings in the third room, a kind of portrait gallery, show Butzer�s repertory cast of characters that include a boy, a girl, a cat, cartoon-eyed heads, a group portrait, and a couple in a landscape with a house. The house that reappears in Butzer�s paintings is monogrammed with the letter �N� in red for Nasaheim, Butzer�s fictional location that is a combination of NASA and Anaheim. Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, was originally founded and named by German immigrants in the 19th Century.
Andr� Butzer was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1973, and lives in Rangsdorf near Berlin. In 1996 he co-founded the �revolutionary� Akademie Isotrop in Hamburg with about 20 other young artists and writers. The academy remained active doing exhibitions and publications until 2000. Butzer has since organized "Kommando" exhibitions that include many of the same artists and pay tribute to different real or fictional people. Butzer has a personal organization he calls FRIEDENS-SIEMENSE CO. which is dedicated to abstraction. His work was recently seen in the group exhibition �Euro-Centric� at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.
Walter Robinson 80s Paintings April 5 - May 3 Opening: April 5, 6-8 pm
Walter Robinson�s paintings from the Romance Series were first shown at Metro Pictures in the 1980s. The works are brilliantly-colored, deftly-painted illustrations that, as described by the artist, are �of people kissing, romance, beautiful women, strong men and desire...the act of putting paint on canvas was an intimate act suited well to depicting intimate acts. A little bit Neo-Expressionist and a little bit Post-Modern, the paintings represent a search for authentic subjectivity by an appeal to something hard-wired or innate.� Robinson used a �pop format� or "image bank" that seemed to be in danger of disappearing: the illustrations for covers of pulp paperbacks dating back to the early 1950s. Many of the paintings, as Robinson describes, are blissful images of �l'amour fou� or suggest an �erotic delirium.� Others show couples fighting or women resisting male assaults (typically with a small automatic!) in addition to images of comfort and protection.
Robinson�s other exhibitions at Metro Pictures have included paintings that �took up the theme of desire and authenticity...using straightforward illustrative styles of painting��portraits of everyday products, his small daughter, her toys, still lives of alcoholic beverages and spin paintings.
Walter Robinson received a BA from Columbia University and is currently the Editor of Artnet.com magazine. His art was included in the exhibition �The Downtown Show� at the Grey Art Gallery as well as shows at The New Museum and The Drawing Center. He was a member of CoLab and exhibited in galleries in the East Village in the 1980s. Robinson was Contributing Editor at Art in America from 1978-1997, cofounder (with Edit DeAk) of Art-Rite Magazine in the 1970s, and Art Editor of The East Village Eye in the 1980s. He was the correspondent for �Art Gallery Beat� in the late 1990s and is the author of �Instant Art History� (Ballantine, 1994).
