The people of Zurich were utterly horrified when Ingvild Goetz opened her new gallery in 1972 with a happening by Wolf Vostell criticizing Swiss arms deliveries to Angola. The settlement permit was gone. And from then on Goetz showed Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman and lots of Arte Povera – in Munich.
Goetz has devoted herself to her collection since 1984, which included the systematic acquisition of media art very early on. Your private museum was created according to the plans of the young architects Herzog
In 2014, when it became clear that her children would want to go their own way, Goetz donated a large part of her video work – and the museum – to the Free State of Bavaria. Thousands of works of art are also available as permanent loans to the Bavarian State Painting Collections, the Munich House of Art and the New Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg.
A particular concern of Ingvild Goetz is her commitment to refugees, especially women and children, or the treatment of eating disorders in young people, to which the proceeds from rearrangements and updated specifications of her collection have flowed in the past. Recently, she has been increasingly concerned with poverty in old age.
“My goal is to enable people with restricted mobility, loneliness and mental stress to grow old with dignity and to enable them to participate in cultural life.” This is how Goetz describes her affair of the heart, which, as we know from the many projects that have already been initiated, she will pursue with the necessary seriousness and energy.
The 49 works that she is now auctioning off at Sotheby’s Cologne branch (more to come in the London spring auction) aim to provide a solid financial basis for this new philanthropic concept. 24 lots will be offered in an online auction. 25 works will be called up in the Palais Oppenheim in a classic live auction.
Among them is André Butzer’s oil painting “N-Mädele” from 2007, a 70.5 by 45.5 centimeter picture from 2007. Butzer, who before settling in Rangsdorf near Berlin, went to the longing distance to California , describes his painting as “Sci-fi Expressionism. He names Walt Disney (easily recognizable), Edvard Munch (isolation, fear) and Hölderlin (pure poetry) as role models. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid is organizing a first retrospective outside of Germany this year for Butzer’s 50th birthday.
In his “NASA-Heim” motifs or “N” pictures, the unexpectedly distant meets the familiar and homely in a cheerful, often shrill color mood. Extraterrestrial (NASA) and terrestrial (home refers to Anaheim, where the Disney Resort is located) are in balance. A fantasy seems to exhaust itself in naive abstraction. Perhaps it’s just irony, huge oval eyes in oversized heads, oversized hands in white gloves, “Bad Painting”.
Painted rather sloppily, Butzer shows the outstretched middle finger to artistic arrogance and all the utopias that go with it. Extremes collide with melancholically spiced pleasure. The work is estimated at 60,000 euros. That is in line with the market. But its provenance and the noble use of the sum raised for this have inestimable potential.
