Andrea Büttner was born in 1972 in Stuttgart, and lives and works in Berlin. With a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London, where she wrote her thesis on the relationships between art and shame, she also studied at Humboldt University and the Berlin University of Arts. Büttner has a particular preference for pre-modern techniques, such as woodcut, weaving and glass painting, and explores an extremely diverse range of themes (including art history, botany, Catholicism, philosophy and outsider art). The lowly is one of the common threads running through her work, evidenced in her choice of both materials and subjects. The latter, directly or indirectly, address poverty and vulnerability, which we find in their Franciscan asceticism and their motifs of beggars and nuns. For her new work Bergers et Rois (Shepherds and Kings, 2017), Andrea Büttner dwells on the gesture of kneeling – as a position of deference as well as nobility. She was been nominated for the 2017 Turner Prize.

Previous exhibitions (selection)

2017
Gesamtzusammenhang, Kunst Halle Sankt Gammem, St Gallen (Switzerland)

2016
Beggars and iPhones, Kunsthalle, Vienna (Austria)
Piano Destructions and Alle Bilder, Musée régional d’art contemporain, Sérignan (France)

2015
Andrea Büttner, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (United States)

2014
Andrea Büttner. 2, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Germany)