Yuz Museum is pleased to present “Fool, Leaving the Shelter of Seclusion”, a major survey exhibition to chronicle, in a few exemplary steps, the trajectory of one of Germany’s most influential artists, Werner Büttner, from March 22 to June 22, 2025. It is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Asia. Organized by Yuz Museum in close collaboration with the artist and the curator Thomas Eller, this exhibition features a total of 46 major works, including 39 paintings and a group of 7 sculptures, comprising a comprehensive overview of the artist’s prolific career spanning from 1979 to 2024.
Born in Jena in 1954, Werner Büttner is a key figure in the German art scene of the late twentieth century. With his close friends, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, he formed a strong presence, emerging in the late 1970s, projecting a sense of (sometimes dark) humor that was intended to shake up and invigorate an art scene steeped in rigid conceptualism. Their “joy of (bad) painting” became an inspiration for a new generation of artists and “electrified” a whole generation of younger painters, like Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, both his students. Büttner also left his mark on many of his Chinese students that chose to come to Hamburg and for him to be their teacher.
“Neue Wilde (New Wilds)” was an artistic movement in West Germany that emerged in the late 1970s. The appearance of the trio (Büttner, Kippenberger and Oehlen) resonated throughout Germany with similar groups in other cities. Mülheimer Freiheit in Cologne, Moritzboys in Berlin and Gruppe Normal in Düsseldorf. Their “Hunger nach Bildern (Hunger for Pictures)” brushed aside an anemic and formulaic art practice and ushered in a new era of cultural invigoration.
This is exactly the same time when in China a whole new generation of artists emerged and founded what is today the very distinct and very strong Chinese artworld. Both developments share a kindred spirit and are both an emanation of “Zeitgeist” (as Hegel would have called it) and in fact the 1982 exhibition in Berlin by the same name, “Zeitgeist”, galvanized the whole Western art scene well beyond Germany. In Beijing, it was the artists who then became the Stars Group,that launched an exhibition in 1979, that jump-started the scene, while the 1993 exhibition “China Avantgarde” in Berlin brought international success to the blossoming artworld of China. Showing Werner Büttner’s work at the Yuz Museum nods to the kinship of “A New Spirit in Painting” that emerged simultaneously in different parts of the world.
Werner Büttner emerged from this time as a singular and exceptional voice. If Germany had a Literati Culture, Büttner could be considered one of the most prominent proponents. There is hardly any other artist in Germany, who is more well-read than him. Harald Falckenberg, collector of contemporary art, once said: “If Büttner had not become an artist, he would also have become a famous writer.” The artist’s field of interest is extremely wide. From the myths of early nomadic cultures to the skepticism of Montaigne’s Essais, the artist has devoured Western philosophy and grand literature, not as an academic, but for personal use and as a means of developing his own personality. The human condition in all its glory and its misery is at the core of his interest and compassion. His intellectual curiosity and rigorous thinking are paired with a heightened sensibility for human strife. And all his paintings are witness to this uncompromising commitment to “La Condition Humaine”.
Looking at Büttner’s paintings at first is a puzzling experience. He often uses metonymic strategies (exchanging one word/image for a similar one), or metaphors (exchanging one word/image for something else completely). In other words, images become shields of sorts, that protect and insulate the factual, or emotional core from the harshness of reality. This has become Büttner’s artistic methodology and visual language which he applies to all aspects of human life. There seem to be two reoccurring traits in his work, deep irony that cautions you to never believe in anything you see, and a deep desire to keep meaning alive, despite its obvious dangers. Werner Büttner is a believer, a believer in nothing. He sees the world and its references as a quarry of sorts, from where he receives the building blocks of his pictorial world, and he sees connections where no one else has looked.
The exhibition “Fool, Leaving the Shelter of Seclusion” is structured around eight important chapters from his imaginary book of life: The Beginnings and Other Self-Portraits; The Self; Women; Art History as Mirror; Man and Animal; Childhood; Literature as Saviour; La Condition Humaine. For the first time in China, this exhibition presents an exemplary cross section of the vast artistic oeuvre of Werner Büttner, demonstrating the unique power of art as a tool for critique and reflection on the contradictions and absurdities of human existence.
