Michael Buthe

Michael Buthe (1 August 1944 – 15 November 1994) was a German artist who lived and worked between Germany and Morocco.

He exhibited widely throughout Europe during his life and is known for his eclectic and prolific oeuvre which encompasses painting, sculpture, and installation.

Michael Buthe was born on 1 August 1944 in Sonthofen in southern Germany to a Roman Catholic family.

From 1964 to 1968, he studied at the Werkkunstschule, Kassel, now the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Thereafter he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as master student of Joseph Beuys.

He began exhibiting in 1968, participating in Harald Szeeman’s landmark exhibition When Attitude Becomes Form: Live in Your Head at the Kunsthalle Bern the year after.

Some of his most notable works during this time consisted of paintings made by cutting into the fabric and exposing the stretcher bars.

In the 1970s, Buthe began to travel extensively to Africa and the Middle East, most notably to Morocco where he took up extended residences in the cities of Essaouira and Marrakesh.

His foreign stays heavily influenced his work, incorporating the sights and sounds of the countries he visited into his visual language.

The experiences likewise spurned on engagements with spiritual and mythological elements in Buthes’ work.

Buthe likewise began to create installation works from the 1970s onward.

In 1972, he attempted to bring Gnawa musicians to documenta 5, envisioning them performing in traditional tents.

Given their minority status in Morocco—therefore lacking Moroccan passports—the musicians were barred from performing internationally.

Though he was unable to fully realize this project, Buthe was galvanized to further develop his immersive, large-scale works.

Buthe was also a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1983 until his death at the age of 50 in 1994.

Amongst others, Klaus Girnus and Stefan Kürten were two of his master students.

Despite enjoying success throughout Europe, he was relatively under-discussed amongst his contemporaries in America, but has come under recent re-examination with a number of posthumous solo and group exhibitions.

His work was well collected by museums both during his lifetime and in recent years.

Significant representations of his work can be found in S.M.A.K - Stedelijk Museum voor Actguele Kunst, Ghent; Tate Britain, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Kolumba, the Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, as well as the Museum Ludwig, also in Cologne.