Andrea Büttner

Beggars is an ongoing series of woodblock prints based on Ernst Barlach’s sculpture Verhüllte Bettlerin (1919), where the artist repeats the simplified form of a beggar characterised by shrouded shoulders and downward pointing hands. The works develop out of Büttner’s interest in Franciscan spirituality and in the iconography of poverty in visual culture. They speak of the relationship between poverty and shame, between public and private, between what is communicated to the external world and the inner feelings of the individual.

The Phone Etchings are an abstract depiction of an everyday gesture: evidencing traces of the artist’s scrolling on her smartphone over the course of a number of Google searches. These gestural marks are transposed and vastly enlarged into etchings. The immediacy of Büttner’s onscreen touch contrasts with the slowness of the manual printmaking process.

Started in 2021, Büttner’s series of vases formally responds to organic shapes, adorned with leaves and spherical nodules that recall flower bulbs. These elements relate to Büttner’s ongoing interest in organic matters such as potatoes, stones and moss. Glass has also long been a medium of choice for the artist, illustrated in her ongoing series of reversed glass paintings. Here, the playful aesthetic of the vases can be seen as a nod to Post-Modernism, but it also sits within Büttner’s ongoing questioning of the boundaries between Fine Art and craft, high-brow culture and middle-class taste. 

A selection of glass-mounted postcards considers the formal expression of religious spaces. Among the structures depicted in the postcards are stained glass windows designed by John Piper in Coventry Cathedral and the altar fresco mural by Georg Meistermann in the Maria Regina Martyrum in Berlin. These particular features are selected as elements of religious space which articulate the convergence of formal abstraction and symbolism. The postcards also gesture to the relation of devotional spaces to other social functions, including mourning, atoning, and healing. The Maria Regina Martyrum, a Roman Catholic church located near the former Plötzensee Prison, was occupied as an execution site under the Nazi regime. The church was constructed in the 1960s to honour those who died resisting the regime, functioning as a religious space as well as a tribute and memorial. The postcards are a result of Büttner’s recent research involving the Karmel Heilig Blut Dachau to inform forthcoming video projects.

A group of four works on paper feature frame-like forms that are themselves circumscribed by a metal border. These forms recall Derrida’s notion of the ‘supplement’, defined as an entity that is seemingly a secondary addition from the outside, but which in fact provides what is missing within the thing which it ‘supplements’. 

Büttner has repeatedly employed the motif of the potato, taking an interest in its inelegant, plump formal quality. In Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885), one of the most well-known art historical appearances of the potato, the peasants are rendered in ‘the colour of a really dusty potato’, according to the painter, thus forming a metonymic correlation between the potato and the threadbare manual labourers at the dinner table. Büttner’s work relates these formal and historical associations to a religious context, transferring what is conventionally tied to the earthly and the grounded to an elevated position recalling celestial religious frescoes.

A moss garden holding many different species of plants occupies the gallery floor. Beneath the bed and partly obscured are glazed clay sculptures and tuff stones. The moss has been collected and carefully arranged by Ray Tangney, Head of the collection of Lower Plants at National Museum of Wales. The moss requires moist conditions in order to exist and thrive in the duration of its display.