“The only experimental film[s] ever made under the auspices of DEFA. Tantamount to an almost impossible act of daring, here is Böttcher revealing his parallel existence as a painter; connecting up with the film avant-garde and establishing himself as a role model for a whole generation of film-making-painters in the GDR.”  —Diana Mavroleon, closeupfilmcentre.com

“In this poetic and visually sumptuous film [TransformationI: Potter's Bull], painter and filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher (b. 1931) transforms 22 postcards of the Dutch painter Paulus Potter’s iconic work The Bull (1647) by painting over them, documenting on film the process of modification that produces striking new images and brings out unexpected dimensions of the original.”   — Ksenya Gurshtein, National Gallery of Arts, Washington D.C. 

“In his experimental film triptych, Jürgen Böttcher paints over postcards based on works by masters he admires: Paulus Potter, Giorgione and Emanuel de Witte. But he doesn't just play around the given forms with an ink brush, he fabulates, adds to, reflects and projects onto curtains. In front of the camera, he marks the flow of time by rhythmically emphasizing its qualities with the brush. He overlays images with his own images and improvises the resulting frictional noises on the soundtrack. Although Jürgen Böttcher never founded a school, the artist films of Christine Schlegel, Cornelia Schleime, Gabriele Kachold and others would be inconceivable without his unparalleled visual work in GDR film.”   —Christoph Tannert, Gegenbilder: Filmische Subversionen in der DDR 1976 - 1989

“Böttcher superimposes his own creative process onto the pictures, playing with forms, alienation techniques, accentuations and associations, thus letting past and present flow together. Böttcher's cinematic tribute to Hermann Glöckner, one of the most important people active in the visual arts in East Germany, is equally the document of a creative process.” —Arsenal-berlin.de

“Böttcher combines his painterly and cinematic talents to explore the interactions of various forms of media including painting, still photography, film, and television… […] The presentation of Strawalde’s overpaintings in the Transformations films takes four main forms. The simplest form is a sequence of full-frame shots of each overpainting held for several seconds (usually between five and ten) with a two second fade-out and fade-in separating the images. There is also a variation on this form after the opening credits of Potter’s Bull and Venus According to Giorgione. Here, Böttcher stands in front of the camera holding a stack of postcards, which he displays in quick succession. The first postcard is unmodified, an “original,” as it were. This is followed by a handful of overpainted postcards of the same image before a new “original” is displayed and the process repeats. The third form is more active, and process focused. It also begins with a full-frame shot, this time of an unmodified postcard; but instead of cutting to a new image, Strawalde’s hand, gripping an artistic implement, appears in the frame and begins to paint or draw on the postcard. The shot stays with this process to varying stages of completion and ends with a jump cut to another shot. Lastly, the fourth form is a radical departure from the first three. Here, instead of the overpaintings themselves, diapositive slides of the overpaintings are projected onto various objects and surfaces in and around Böttcher’s East Berlin apartment.”   —Matthew Bauman, “The Transgression of Overpainting: Jürgen Böttcher’s Radical Experiments with Intermediality in Transformations (1981).” Moving Frames: Photographs in German Cinema.