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, exploring and challenging the belief systems that underpin them.

Deliberately working within a range of premodernist media that includes techniques such as woodcut, reverse glass painting, weaving, and moss cultivation, Büttner emphasizes the direct materiality of such methods in dialogue and counterpoint with video, performance, and installation. By restoring outmoded methods to our time, the artist 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 underrecognized artists who engaged in socially responsive projects, including HAP Grieshaber and 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).

To complement the exhibition Andrea Büttner, the Walker presents the artist’s multichannel video installation Piano Destructions (2014). Piano Destructions takes as its starting point the international Fluxus performances of the 1960s, in which predominantly male artists destroyed pianos as part of their artistic process, notably George Maciunas and others represented in the Walker’s collection such as Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and Ben Vautier. The burning, dropping, smashing, and hammering of the pianos—an instrument traditionally associated with bourgeois female education—resulted in highly charged and gendered acts.

In 2014, Andrea Büttner orchestrated a performance at the Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff, Canada) of nine female pianists playing in chorus on nine grand pianos, in counterpoint to the framing of this male aggression in art history. Selections included Romantic-era pieces by Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, accompanied by two choir pieces by Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi, which were arranged for piano for the first time.

Recorded for nine speakers, one for each piano in the performance, Büttner’s Piano Destructions plays the concert alongside archival footage of the destructions, as each piano becomes part of a larger choir. The Walker’s presentation will also include a new large-scale woodcut by Büttner entitled Piano (2015).

Curator: Fionn Meade