Heinz Butz
A Quiet Avant-Gardist in Upper Bavaria

November 23th 2025 until March 3rd 2026

This exhibition is a small yet significant retrospective. It looks back on the imposing oeuvre of a lifetime. It is dedicated to the painter Heinz Butz, who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday in December 2025 and who spent much of his life as an artist in Upper Bavaria. Butz’s renown as a distinguished artist of the second half of the twentieth century extended far beyond his native region, even though he was always more reserved than some of his contemporaries. Critics for their part have drawn comparisons to some of the biggest names in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, including Vincent van Gogh, Kazimir Malevich, Robert Delaunay, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Hans Arp, Walter Gropius, and Blinky Palermo.

This first comprehensive solo exhibition of Heinz Butz’s oeuvre at a museum pays posthumous tribute to the artist—he died, aged ninety-six, in 2022.

The exhibition was made possible by loans from the artist’s estate; Sammlung Werner Asam, Aichach; Galerie Jahn & Jahn, Munich; Sammlung Markus Michalke, Munich and Jan Schmid, Munich. With generous support from Freundeskreis Museum Starnberger See.

What makes his work so important?

Heinz Butz was neither a painter-celebrity nor a revolutionary; he was a quiet avant-gardist who focused on assimilating what he found in the past and in the world around him and developing it further. He strove for precision and discernment rather than radical change or glamour. His creative expression was muted yet sustained by adamant strength and confidence. He often seemed ahead of his time precisely because he kept his distance from the styles and movements of his era. That was how he forged and followed his own path, unfurling a creative cosmos that was as tightly integrated as it was open-ended and that prepared the ground for, extended, or even anticipated major developments in the history of art.

All art—and Butz’s doubly so—is rooted in life and lived experience; as the artist himself concisely put it: “Plants need soil.” So let us briefly sketch the life out of which his art grew. Born in Dillingen in Bavarian Swabia in December 1925, Butz was drafted into the Second World War when he was just eighteen years old. He witnessed the cruelty of the war’s final years, was taken prisoner on the eastern front and held in a Soviet labor camp. A year later, he returned to Germany.

Perhaps to escape his experiences of fascism, war, and captivity, he turned his attention to nature and art. He studied at the Augsburg School of Art and Design and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, to both of which he would later return as a teacher. With passion and determination, Butz honed his skills as a draftsman and painter, filling countless sketchbooks with nature studies and practicing himself in rendering what he saw and felt. The artist’s first paintings, from around 1950, show him charting this field, new to him yet centuries old. Ten years later, his creative idiom had matured, and Butz devised a distinctive style in painting, both formally rigorous and open, based on the primary elements of line, shape, and color. This would be the steady center of his creative expression, and now he set out, cheerfully and with a lively imagination, to explore its possibilities. Over the decades that followed, Butz built a creative cosmos that nimbly defies categorization. It includes pictures on canvas as well as what he called picture-objects—freestanding shapes in three dimensions—and, finally, sculptures composed of found objects. What they have in common is that they face us straightforwardly: not as representations, as likenesses, but as abstract forms and objects charged with energy—and yet then again also as pictures, with composition, harmony, and inner tension, perhaps even a motif. This subtle balancing of forces is where Heinz Butz proved himself a true master, expertly translating his alert and delicate sensations into concrete works that evoke sensations in turn, entirely without the indirection of the recognizable image. A picture, in his art, is no longer merely the intermediary of a meaning or subject matter: the picture itself is the meaning and subject of his art.

This exhibition consists of two parts. The presentation on the ground floor offers an introduction to the artist’s oeuvre. The display in the downstairs galleries spotlights the interrelations between individual works that hold his creative cosmos together.