Deborah Butterfield

Jul 9

Exhibition Title

July 9 - August 24, 2020

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce its 13th 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.

The artist also continues her exploration of color, juxtaposing primary hues of man-made materials along with natural grey and brown wood tones taken from the natural materials. These works expand her initial building material of found wood to include marine debris collected from the shores of Alaska and British Columbia, much of it likely swept to sea by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Since 1980, Butterfield has been constructing sculptures of horses from 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, sticks, planks, boards, and more recently plastic and metal material onto an armature that gives the basic posture of the particular horse. Molds are made for each chunk of material piece by piece. The burnable wood elements are covered with heat resistant plaster and then baked in a furnace until they completely burn away. Molds are also made for each of the plastic or metal man-made materials to recreate their forms in bronze. Molten bronze is then 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 or a torn edge in metal. Since the wood pieces are destroyed and the plaster is discarded in the casting process, each sculpture is unique and cannot be duplicated. The work is then reassembled, and the bronze parts welded together. Butterfield works with the foundry to apply a range of patinas to the bronze to suggest the original wood used in making the sculpture.