The Ranch is pleased to participate in the inaugural Independent 20th Century Art Fair from September 8-11, 2022 with a presentation of seminal Werner Büttner paintings. The showcase spotlights the artist’s work from the 1980s, during which he developed a crude, faux-naïve style to service his critique of Cold War German society and politics. Forming a triumvirate of terror alongside Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen in Hamburg, eventually called Junge Wilde (Wild Youth), the irascible artists rejuvenated painterly possibility amid the country’s anti-humanist dirge through a language of distrust and irreverence.

A historic figure and contemporary master, Büttner joins the sardonic pessimism of his generation with precise visual references to Germany’s reparative struggles. As in the three works on view, this disentanglement of taboos is often levied through symbolic figures or anthropomorphic animals. In Hamburg, Büttner located the fatalistic nourishment to contend with his immediate forebears of German art: Joseph Beuys, Jörg Immendorff, Sigmar Polke. His dialogue with the past of painting and its present prospects was ultimately unsociable: “I preferred to comment on the mindlessness of it all from the comfort of my own home, from my studio. So, art was a perfect match for my apathy. At last, my loathing for human entanglements had found an acceptable outlet.”

Indeed, tremoring attempts to assuage guilt and institute new order in post-fascist Germany were brusquely countenanced and countered in succinct paintings that expose complicity, consolation, and corruption. Disappointed Pupil Leaves the House of Luxury (1987) gives an apish man crawling away from the spoils and temptations of a decanted bottle of champagne and flutes. Alternately, in Nursing Woman (1985) joined bodies and an ambiguous hand placement unsettles the Oedipal tension between breastfeeding mother and dependent child.

These quippish titles summarize the action of the painting and, moreover, tender lessons and instructions. Büttner’s disciplinary scope is entrenched in the province of language. Referring to himself as a “text-image strategist,” the artist forwards an ideology of painting in which the linguistic and imagistic cannot be uncoupled—depending on the other to amplify meaning. In fact, every day, the artist begins his practice with a morning newspaper, its perplexing reportage offering potential subjects, succinct visual puns, and verbal play.

Büttner’s iconoclast paintings continue to capture the absurdities of contemporary politics and culture, establishing existentialist dread, sexual deviance, and art historical tropes as his daily bread. All which is esteemed or held in high regard is a potential subject for discrediting in the artist’s hands. A recent painting, Super Rigid Composition (2016), presents a haphazard array of objects (a wiener dog, plate of sausages, and coat rack) to rhapsodize on the illogical election of works of arts as “masterpieces.” With the coat rack’s sly nod to Duchamp and the sausages’ honorific to Dieter Roth, this quirky composite aligns with that subversive strain of modernism which takes aim at the very notion of art historical significance and the exalted object.

Werner Büttner has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at museums including Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany; ZKM—Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Kunsthalle Dominikanerkirche, Osnabrück, Germany; FRAC Poitou Charentes, Angoulême, France; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. His work is in collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; ZKM—Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.