Andrea Büttner No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion

In her artistic practice, Andrea Büttner (b. 1972 in Stuttgart) combines art history with social and ethical issues.

Her research-based works focus on wide-ranging themes such as poverty, shame, work, craft, religion, ascription of value, vulnerability, community, botany, philosophy, and art, which she examines in terms of their ambivalent tension between aesthetics and ethics. The internationally renowned artist uses various conceptual methods, materials, and media—from woodcut, painting, drawing, printing, and photography to installation, video, sculpture, glass art, and ceramics—to pose fundamental questions about the relationship between intimate artistic production and public exposure, between mechanisms of representation and ascriptions of value in art and society.

With the exhibition at K21, Andrea Büttner aims to bring together the various strands of her current research and work. Thematically, she focuses on the structural connection of shame, labor, power and the question of value creation processes and valuation systems, art historical images of so-called shame punishments and their contemporary relevance, arts and crafts as a political field and its ambivalent role for national and religious identity formation, and fascist continuities in the ecology movement. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication conceived by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Andrea Büttner

No Fear, No Shame, No Confusion

Oct 28, 2023— Feb 18, 2024

On the cover: Andrea Büttner, Beggar, 2016, Holzschnitt auf Papier, 126,5 x 90 cm © Andrea Büttner / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023; courtesy Hollybush Gardens, London; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Jan Mot, Brüssel, and Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz and Zürich, Foto: Flying

Source: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen