ANDRÉ BUTZER / HANS JOSEPHSOHN at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2024

ANDRÉ BUTZER / HANS JOSEPHSOHN
Bleibtreustraße 15/16, 10623 Berlin
8 June - 3 August 2024
Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present a duo exhibition of André Butzer and Hans Josephsohn at Bleibtreustraße 15/16, in Berlin.
Flight, desolation and displacement are deeply inscribed in the work of Hans Josephsohn (1920-2012). Not in terms of motifs or themes, but as a fundamental life experience. Unlike the smooth, gracefully fluid agility of Lehmbruck or Maillol, who inspired him in his youth, and unlike Giacometti's fraying dissolution of the figure in the glistening backlight of an atomic flash, for instance, Josephsohn clings firmly to the figure. Every grasp of the shapeless plaster solidifies the human form. Whether in the case of a tiny figurine or a monumental body, he always strives to achieve the appropriate composure, as if trying to reassure himself again and again of the enduring presence of his sitters. A presence that is brought abruptly and inevitably into the space. Josephsohn works towards a space, into a space. He takes nothing away, but rather brings something new into the world. Positive placements, solid and massive, fragile and delicate. With their jagged and agitated surfaces, with their restrained but decisive colouring, his sculptures become a defiant counterpart to their beholders. The torsos, busts and steles of standing or reclining women are firmly contained in themselves, rounded, clenched. In its archaic simplicity, the individual body asserts itself in its own place. Josephsohn rediscovers this pictorial trait from antiquity, the freestanding individual among the entirety of the cosmos - vulnerable, beset and tackled from all sides, but free despite everything - and therefore open to the possibility of an encounter, of human recognition.
André Butzer (*1973) insists on mere human dignity, on the consistency of being. His work has always been ‘right in the middle’ of the 'destructive and redemptive contradictions’ of the world - expression and ready-made, repetition and individuality, insurrection, life and death - acting them out by means of colour and thus surpassing them. Despite their ostensible variety, his paintings are of substantial unity. Perhaps, Butzer surmises, it is precisely in the face of the relentless en-framing of the present that 'the so-called world must be concealed so that one can see anything at all’, so that the absent may appear anew in the present. Like the composite figure in Frau Dr. Schlaf heilt mit Sternenkräften, 2024. With such ‘Synthetic Paintings’, Butzer has challenged our image of man since 1999: is the body destroyed by the technology that permeates it, or does painting succeed in turning the tortured body once more into a figure and allowing it to enter into a more wholesome, 'cosmic' contiguity? Both the enormous Frau Dr. Schlaf and the modest woman in Untitled, 2024, merge with their surrounding colours and forms into a planar ornament that spans the entire painting. Butzer incorporates them into the decorative whole and thereby realises the unity of their opposites. The round yellow spots on Frau Dr. Schlaf's face may be contaminated and poisoned like pustules. Or might they be suns upon a face? The circular ornaments on Untitled are reminiscent of flowers or fruit. Oranges and roses, in all their simplicity and grace, no one like the other, individual and freely evolving.
In their impaired humanity, Josephsohn's sculptures and Butzer's paintings draw a visionary arc from antiquity to post-apocalyptic space junk. No becoming, just being. Imprinting being onto becoming. The exhibition as a place both within and outside of time, where, for a brief glimpse, the contradictory disruption of the world appears to be resolved and whole again, where experience and memory, the past and the future are preserved.
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