Andrea Büttner’s work often creates connections between art history and social or ethical issues, with a particular interest in notions of poverty, shame, value, and vulnerability, and both exploring and challenging the belief systems that underpin them. Working within a range of premodernist media that includes woodcuts, reverse glass painting, weaving, sculpture, and moss cultivation, Büttner emphasizes such methods in dialogue and counterpoint with video, performance, and installation. By restoring outmoded methods of our time, Büttner challenges conventions of high and low, constructing a profound space between ornate and humble, cool remove and humility, and the urge to judge or remain partially withheld. She often infuses her work with her own primary research on artists who engaged in socially responsive projects, including German printmaker and activist HAP Grieshaber and the Welsh painter Gwen John. In other projects, Büttner has positioned the relatively anonymous alongside a questioning of monumental or iconic figures, a contrast evident in the artist’s recent illustration of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).

Walker Art Center

1750 Hennepin Ave

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55403

Walker Art Center
Press Contact: Meredith Kessler, Meredith.Kessler@walkerart.org, 612.375.7651