The present group of works (lot 262-266) offers a glimpse into the diverse, vividly coloured and wildly inventive oeuvre of Michael Buthe: an eccentric visionary who, alongside his friend Sigmar Polke, redefined the role of the artist in postwar Germany. Rejuvenating the languages of myth, magic and wonder in his life and art like, Buthe was a wizardly enigma whose creative practice was nomadic and constantly evolving.

Born in Sonthofen in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, Buthe studied at the Werkkunstschule Kassel and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he first gained attention with dramatically shredded canvases that recalled the work of Lucio Fontana. Several of these were included in Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969. The following year, Buthe took a trip to Marrakech. This visit had a life-changing impact on the artist, who continued over the following decades—and concurrently with Polke in the 1970s—to extensively explore the Middle East and Africa, eventually splitting his time between Morocco and the Rhineland.

When in Germany, Buthe was a frequent visitor to the Gaspelhof commune outside Düsseldorf, which Polke had set up and shared through much of the 1970s with a variety of collaborators, friends and family members. Informed by their exotic travels and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, both artists created boldly experimental works during this period, and portrayed one another in psychedelic photographs.

Buthe’s work was distinctive in its blending of Christian mystical themes—he had been raised as a Roman Catholic—with elements of North African ritual. Creating majestic, cosmic paintings with recurring motifs of suns and stars, he also made Rauschenbergian assemblages of found objects, and became renowned for his installation works, which presented fantastical environments rich in spiritual and liturgical symbolism. His painterly aesthetic was unapologetically lush, conjuring vivid, saturated tableaux from a dizzying array of media including metallic foil, photocollage, poured wax and tree branches.

Buthe’s alchemical, syncretic interest in integrating different belief systems and materials into his work shared much with the Wagnerian approach of Anselm Kiefer; as a Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total artwork’, his itinerant practice also echoed that of Joseph Beuys, whose shamanic, near-messianic aura Buthe greatly admired. Buthe himself would follow Beuys in teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, obtaining a permanent professorship there in 1983.

After his untimely death at the age of fifty in 1994, Buthe’s name began to fade into obscurity relative to some of his longer-lived contemporaries. Recent years, however, have seen a renewed interest in this prolific, pioneering and charismatic artist, who is now being reexamined as an integral figure in the post-war German scene. In 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective that travelled from the Kunstmuseum Luzern to the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent and the Haus der Kunst, Munich.