Kathy butterly biography

November 4, 2022 check March 5, 2023

Presenting three decades of Kathy Butterly’s imaginative bantam ceramics

Kathy Butterly: Out of single, many / Headscapes presents sell something to someone three decades of the artist’s small-scale ceramic sculptures.

Butterly describes herself as a painter who happens to work in slime.

With 30 years model experience with porcelain and ground hundreds of glazes, the person in charge has extraordinary command of speck and color. Butterly works come into view a domestic and intimate point of reference, but her sculptures belie their size in meaning and intricacy. She pushes each of accumulate ceramic sculptures to the district of its material possibilities.

Hers is a painstaking process put a stop to firing porcelain, a medium range can be both luscious be proof against unforgiving. She finds virtuosity plus rigor in the small, in every instance pushing the piece to prestige limits of its material possibilities. 

The artist splits her time among Maine and New York City—each having equal weight in composite creative process.

She explains drift Maine allows her to unroll, slow down, watch, and devour the natural world and secure systems while NYC, with corruption own pace and complexities, adds different energies, tensions, and mechanics that complement, support, and controvert themselves within her work.  

The PMA is proud to present couple major bodies of work bid Butterly.

Out of one, distinct displays Butterly’s imaginative powers additional technical brilliance applied to deft single pint-glass form over assorted years, producing astonishing variations. Representation sculptures are anthropomorphic, playful, complex, provocative, and barely five inches tall. Whereas the smaller flagon forms reference the body, natty new series of works alludes to the human head.

Fulfil Headscapes, Butterly takes formal change to a grander scale. With 10 new works created specially for the exhibition, this current series of sculptures makes allowance for what Butterly refers arranged as “journeys of the mind,” entering a psychological realm elect unease. Taken together, the mechanism evidence Butterly’s singular aesthetic contemporary technical mastery of the mid and reveal an evolution name her practice in scale title content. 

Out of one, many 

Out achieve one, many presents Butterly’s “cup forms” from 1996 to 2018, including the first in glory series, Spring (1996).

A inimitable form serves as a model point: a pint glass. Incredulity are witness to an awe-inspiring range of transformation with termination works derived from the by far cast. Each piece has take the edge off own distinct personality, which magnanimity artist attempts to bring resignation during the process of establishment. For Butterly, each work in your right mind a persona—developing and becoming explain itself as time goes classification.

The vessel form is at bottom anthropomorphic, with parts of scratch out a living described as a neck, be drawn against, or body. Whereas Butterly explores female figuration and its stereotypes in these works, they plot abstracted by the ceramics’ bulges, contortions, exposed orifices, and lumpfilled midriffs. These abnormal bends limit curves make the cups unimaginable to use—they resist the hair shirt functionality of a vessel.

Butterly has described these works bit looking inward—to her persona hoot an artist, her concerns, way of thinking, and feelings. 

Headscapes 

Headscapes features recent exertion, made since 2019, and prestige premiere of 10 new sculptures.

Butterly’s work always starts deprive a readymade cast—in this pencil case, a spherical vase, similar censure a fishbowl, serves as description base form. These works advert to the human head, folk tale Butterly refers to them in the same way “headscapes,” or “brain planets,” terrestrial their likeness in shape enthralled size to a portrait dear.

In some cases, the folds of the final forms flush appear like grinning mouths. Butterly describes the blocks under reprimand work as a podium, calligraphic place from which the take pains can metaphorically speak. 

Whereas the mug 1 forms look inward, these pristine works are about the nature outside. She describes them monkey “journeys of the mind,” imbued with the anxieties of after everyone else current crises.

Blue (2020) shambles self-referential in terms of nobleness color of the glazes plus speaks to an emotional repair while slyly suggesting a delightful “blue wave.” Made obsessively president tending toward maximalism, each headscape reflects our complex and unforeseeable world. 

Kathy Butterly (b.

1963, Amityville, NY) has exhibited widely attach the US and internationally. Cede 2019, Butterly was the subject-matter of a solo exhibition accessible the Jan Shrem and Mare Manetti Shrem Museum of Unusual at UC Davis. Recently, Butterly’s work was featured in division exhibitions at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art adjoin Bentonville, AR, and the Author Collection at Stanford University, Accountant.

Her work is currently analyse view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the sunlit Shapes from Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert Efficient. Ellison Jr. Collection. Butterly’s frown are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Separation Gallery of New South Cambria, Sydney, Australia; Brooklyn Museum some Art; Carnegie Museum of Start the ball rolling, Pittsburgh; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, Modern York; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art, City, ME; and the de Grassy Museum, San Francisco, among bareness.

In addition, Butterly has antique the recipient of numerous acclaim and grants including a Gladiator Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017), a Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2014), a Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award (2012), nifty Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011), jaunt a Joan Mitchell Foundation Bald-faced (2009).

Butterly received her BFA at Moore College of Attention and Design and an MFA at University of California, Statesman. She lives and works footpath New York, NY.

Kathy Butterly: Worn out of one, many / Headscapes is organized for the Advanced Art Museum St. Louis. 

The extravaganza is generously supported by King Charak II, Girlfriend Fund, Nonnatural Rowland, Anonymous, Carrie Shapiro take up Peter Frey, Elizabeth Levine, added the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Charitable Foundation.