Greg Kucera Gallery is excited to announce its 14th exhibition of new sculpture by Deborah Butterfield. This is a diverse collection of new bronze work. Small sculptures have delicate lines created by branch, twig and leaf shapes. Larger pieces incorporate thick sticks and muscular looking chunks of wood, all cast in bronze.
Since 1980, Butterfield has been constructing sculptures of horses from found sticks and plant material from which she creates a casting in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington State. Butterfield sculpts the original work by fastening logs, branches, and sticks onto an armature that gives the basic posture of the particular horse.
First, molds are made for each branch of wood material piece by piece. The burnable wood elements are covered with heat resistant plaster and baked in a furnace until they completely burn away. Next, molten bronze is poured into the recesses left in the plaster molds. When the molds are removed, each piece has been refashioned exactly in bronze—right down to the grain of the wood.
The work is reassembled, and the bronze parts welded together. Finally, Butterfield works with the foundry to apply a range of patinas to the bronze to suggest the original wood used in making the sculpture.
BIOGRAPHY
Deborah Butterfield was born in San Diego, California in 1949. She received her BA and MFA from UC Davis. Butterfield's work has been featured in over 50 museum exhibitions. She has had one-person exhibitions at: Bellevue Arts Museum; Bellevue, WA, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; Denver Botanic Gardens; Tucson Museum of Art; Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, FL; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV and Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; San Diego Museum of Art; Tucson Museum of Art; University Art Museum, University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
The artist will have a one-person exhibition, P.S. These Are Not Horses, at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at University of California, Davis, October 1, 2023–June 24, 2024.
Butterfield’s work is included in the permanent collections of many major museums, including: The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; Dallas Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Palm Springs Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The artist was a recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center.
