WERNER BÜTTNER

WERNER BÜTTNER. LAST LECTURE SHOW | 15 Oct 2021 –  16 Jan 2022 | special exhibition | exhibition catalog | english edition

With a solo exhibition the HAMBURGER KUNSTHALLE honors Werner Büttner (*1954) on the occasion of his farewell after more than 30 years of teaching painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and shows about 100 of his oil paintings and collages from the early 1980s to the immediate present. As a painterly analyst and with crackling humor, Büttner comments in his art on human activity and existence without regard for taboos. His paintings and his titles present the contradictions of social consensus attempts, hint at the political incorrectness of the 1980s and disarm every fighter for an ideal world. The Last Lecture Show presents Büttner's eloquent flood of images in pointed exhibition sections.
In the 1980s, Werner Büttner experimented with gestural painting in brown hues as a representative of the »Junge Wilde«. Since the 1990s, it is concrete forms and bright colors that determine his visual language. Particularly striking are Büttner's absurd-poetic, cryptic work titles, which reflect his intensive reading and from which he speaks as an attentive observer: There a »Whirling Weltgeist« as a dancing dervish meets the »avant-garde from behind« and »The amazingly simple courtship display of the blue-footed booby«.
Werner Büttner, born in Jena, grew up in Munich and Berlin after fleeing to the FRG. His social criticism was programmatic in the 1980s and caused a stir, such as the Sperm Bank for GDR Refugees founded in 1980 and the »Church of Difference«. In Hamburg, he was appointed professor of painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in 1989, from which he will retire in the fall of 2021.

The exhibition is produced in close collaboration with Werner Büttner and the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.