Biography of Andrea Büttner
Andrea Büttner often uses religious themes in her wide-ranging work, from depicting the traditions of nuns and monks in northern Italy in a series of woodcuts to a video piece documenting life of the members of a Carmelite convent in west London and the handcrafted objects they produce there. Deeply influenced by arte povera, Büttner interrogates notions of poverty in her pieces, resulting in exhibitions like Beggars and iPhones at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2016. With a PhD in philosophy and art history, Büttner takes an academic approach to art-making; her thesis on the aesthetics of shame reveals her interest in the potential of this emotion as a subject and terrain of investigation in art.
A professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Mainz, Andrea Büttner lives and works between London and Frankfurt. Born in Stuttgart in 1972, she has had solo exhibitions all over the world, including at the Tate Britain and Whitechapel Gallery, London, as well as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and Artpace, San Antonio. Büttner is the winner of the 2010 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Her work can be found in many international public collections, notably the Tate, MoMA, New York, and the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt.
