Shame, poverty, labor, the practices of religious communities, and the historical entanglement of right-wing ideologies with ecological agriculture are among the themes Andrea Büttner (*1972 in Stuttgart, lives and works in Berlin) explores in her research-based artistic practice. Poised between ethical and aesthetic concerns, they find expression in photography, woodcut, installation, painting, collage, sculpture, and video. Büttner’s work demonstrates that labor and craft are socio-historically politicized fields, closely bound up with the construction of national identities. The new work in the n.b.k. Editions program, a collage on handmade paper, builds on a long-term research project Büttner devoted to the town of Dachau, out of which emerged the video work Karmel Dachau (2019/2022/2023) as well as the photo series plant beds from the plantation and “herbal garden,” used by the SS for biodynamic agricultural research, at the Dachau Concentration Camp (2019–2020). The two images, each built on a single, central vanishing point, are joined into one continuous perspectival space, depicting two sites: on the one hand, a barrack reconstructed in the 1960s at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site; on the other, an image of berlin modern, still under construction – the future museum at the Kulturforum in Berlin that will house, among other collections, the Nationalgalerie’s collection of 20th-century art. Against this backdrop, Andrea Büttner’s new work reveals a surprising visual symmetry between concentration camp barracks and the Federal Republic’s largest cultural construction site.

Andrea Büttner’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, including at: Bechtler Stiftung, Uster / Switzerland (2025); Kunstmuseum Basel; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21, Düsseldorf (both 2023); Kunstverein München, Munich (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2016); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2015); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2013). Büttner has participated in documenta 13 in Kassel and Kabul (2012) as well as the São Paulo Biennial (2018, 2010). In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.