Xippas Gallery Athens is pleased to announce the opening of a show with new works by André Butzer (born 1973, lives in Rangsdorf/Germany) and Thomas Winkler (born 1972, lives in Berlin/Germany).
Both German artists met already in the 1990ies studying at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart/Germany under theorists Diedrich Diederichsen and Michael Dreyer. Later on they started a Berlin publishing company named “Verlag Heckler und Koch, Berlin” in 2003. Since then they have been collaborating in various fields of conceptual art, publishing, text, performance, curating and are currently running an art-gallery named “European Fine Art (EFA)” in Berlin with the important participation of famous painter Ulrich Wulff.
Thomas Winkler, standing alone in the tradition of American and Californian concept art today (Michael Asher, John Baldessari, On Kawara) will present new abstract paintings alongside with large documentary photography and text combining layouts. His paintings should be seen as abstractions of highest degree that co-exist in an intense dependency from his defined personal way of documenting his life and his social backgrounds.
André Butzer, well known world-wide for his paintings since more than a decade, has already shown with Xippas Gallery Athens in 2008. His precisely organized and coloristically very intense oil paintings drift through space and time. Abstraction means in his case that his works seem to abstract themselves from each other in an also life-long process. He calls his latest output therefore “Neo-Cézannism”.
Winkler and Butzer will for the first time show their works together and they are happy to officially end a far too big era in German art with this exhibition, namely the era of state-artist Gerhard Richter, who they now claim to replace on his number one spot by the help of the Greek audience.
