Jana Büttner

Jana Büttner works the human figure, and clay above all: earth modelled with bare hands remains the heart of her practice, before casting in bronze or resin. "Jana feels a deep connection with clay, which allows her to express herself with her hands," says Galerie Calderone. She sculpts from the live model, a constraint she embraces: the pose changes constantly, and it is up to her to choose the moment she wants to keep — a moment that can range from vulnerability to power.

Her manner rests on a gesture of simplification. She experiments with textures, softens edges, merges forms into one another, leaving some parts deliberately indistinct. She explains it with an image borrowed from reading: "It's like reading a book: you don't need to read every word to understand, you just read the first and last letter and your brain knows what the word means" (Jana Büttner, janabuettner.com). She seeks the same effect in sculpture: giving enough for the eye to complete the rest.

Her ideas come not only from what she sees but from what she hears and reads — music, stories told to her, the poetry of Goethe, Rilke and Hesse. "I find that poetry is the fastest way to trigger an emotion," she told Fine Art Connoisseur. Her aim is stated: "to evoke emotions and encourage the viewer's empathy", so that viewers can recognise themselves in the work. For her, the three-dimensionality of sculpture and the space it occupies create a natural presence that favours this identification.

Jana Büttner was born in 1997 in Salzburg, Austria. She holds German, Austrian and Czech nationality, and now works between Italy, Austria and Germany. Her training began early: from 2008 to 2012 she attended the Musisches Gymnasium in Salzburg, a school with an artistic focus. At fourteen she joined the HTL Hallein, a school of applied arts, where she trained in sculpture for four years (2012-2016): carving marble and wood, metalwork, clay modelling. She graduated as a sculptor in 2016.

In 2017 she entered the Florence Academy of Art, where she devoted herself to figurative sculpture modelled in clay until 2020. The school honoured her several times: a third-year scholarship and second prize for sculpture of the year in 2019, then the sculpture of the year prize in 2020. She then stayed on as a teacher, in charge of drawing from 2020 to 2022, before establishing herself as an independent sculptor from 2022-2023.

Her career quickly became international. She exhibits regularly in London with the Society of Portrait Sculptors ("Face" exhibition, from 2019 to 2025), at MEAM in Barcelona as part of the Figurativas salon, and in Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Norway. In 2023 she won first prize for sculpture at the Figurativas salon at MEAM for the work "Burden", first place in the Future Generation Art Prize of The Society of America (Boston) and third place at the Art Renewal Center's ARC Salon. She is represented by Galerie Calderone, which presents her at the ST-ART Strasbourg, Lille Art Up! and Affordable Art Fair London fairs.