There is a lot of superb contemporary sculpture and realism being made these days; this article by Brandon Rosas shines light on a gifted individual.
For sculptor Jana Buettner (b. 1997), creativity has been encouraged since childhood. “I remember my mother taking me on trips to source our own pigments from mountains in France, and sculpting with clay we harvested from riverbeds ourselves,” recalls the Austrian-born artist.
A summer job at the Galerie Schloss Wiespach in Hallein brought a teenage Buettner into contact with renowned sculptors Grzegorz Gwiazda, Debasish Bera, and Eudald de Juana Gorriz. Encouraged by de Juana, in 2017 Buettner enrolled in the Florence Academy of Art, where she learned to model the figure in clay with stunning accuracy. Three years later, she graduated with a Sculpture of the Year award and a staff position as a drawing instructor at the academy.
Now fully independent, Buettner divides her time between Florence and Salzburg. Her graceful bronzes capture the human figure with deep empathy and are inspired by stories of people she meets, as well as by the poetry of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Rainer Marie Rilke, and Hermann Hesse. “I find that poetry is the fastest way to trigger emotions,” Buettner says. “It can paint a clear picture before my very soul.”
Buettner’s sculptural technique is a form of poetry itself: she enjoys simplifying and blending forms to create an aesthetically pleasing representation of reality that is easily understood by the eye. “It’s like reading a book — it’s enough to read the first and last letter of a word, and your brain will know what it means,” says Buettner, adding that she aims to create works that speak to the various ways in which viewers engage with art.
One of Buettner’s recent sculptural poems is “Trapped,” in which a woman has folded herself into a timid yet weightless crouch, one arm wrapped around her ribcage as the other presses against an invisible barrier. “This piece symbolizes the internal walls that we as humans sometimes put up,” Buettner explains. “It is not about being physically trapped, but about what we experience nowadays — a feeling of drowning, or of pushing up against something we want to escape.”
Although Buettner’s work does not shy away from exploring life’s difficulties, it is also hopeful. Even as the upraised hand in “Trapped” indicates a wall, it reaches beyond it, as if in search of another soul — an affirmation of a deeply human belief in our power to understand one another and make each other’s burdens lighter.
