Andrea Büttner’s art practice explores the notions of shame, poverty, vulnerability, and dignity, and the belief systems that underpin them. Through woodcuts, reverse glass painting, sculpture, video, and performance, she draws art historical, social, and ethical connections. Her work often makes reference to religious communities, drawing attention to the relationship between religion and art, and between religious communities and the art world. Little Works (2007), for example, is a video of edited footage that a Carmelite nun named Sister Luke filmed within her convent, documenting the sisters making various small crafts by hand. Büttner mines the political dimension of her chosen materials, such as woodcuts. Devalued by male gestural painters, the medium has stayed in her practice since university. She has made them from plywood and a dismantled piano, noting that through art history–from Joseph Beuys to Nam June Paik–men have destroyed pianos, always as a final gesture putting an end to bourgeois culture. Having done her PhD thesis on the relationship between art and shame, most of her works harken back to this central theme. She explains, “I think structurally all art is somehow close to shame. Shame is relevant structurally to everything that has to do with doing something in the studio, in a private place, and then showing it to others and this public will judge it according to certain conventions.”

Büttner has had solo exhibitions of her work at Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, as well as at the Banff Centre in Canada, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and National Museum Cardiff in Wales, among others.