Kathy Butterly: Yellow Haze

JANUARY 22nd - MAY 15th, 2021

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Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to announce, ”Yellow Haze,” an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Kathy Butterly. The exhibition opens at the Los Angeles gallery January 22nd and runs through May 15th, 2021.  This will be the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, since joining in 2003.

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Kathy Butterly creates ceramic sculpture and yet she combines it with a painters’ intuitive process of experimentation of color through glazes. Her latest body of work, made over the past 12 months in her New York studio, pushes her practice in a new direction— slightly larger clay forms are in evidence, to give herself, Butterly says, “a bigger canvas with which to work.”

Butterly has chosen to work with a restricted scale for over 30 years.  “I find a strength in the intimate,” she explains, “I find power in scale shifts within the works, I enjoy making works that are not rushed and demand a lot of skill and knowledge. The small scale is very demanding. I have a deep understanding and relationship with my materials and this skill allows me to work with passion and allow humor to flow. Beauty, humor, awkwardness are all important to me. Humor is a gateway to provoking deeper thoughts, tough thoughts.”

Working with restricted scale is also, she says, a conscious social and political statement. ”I choose not to take up a lot of space with my artwork, to impose, but rather to engage the time and thinking of viewers. The works sort of demand you look at them and you take time to look at them —smaller forms pull you in and you spend a lot of time looking at them, they keep unraveling information. Environmentally I also do not want to create a large footprint, that is important to me as a world citizen.”

The variation in the scale of her clay forms is matched by a simultaneous expansion in the complexity of formal schemes. Colors are familiar, but mixed or sometimes muted to cover or to occlude sculptural detail, such as her trademark minute hand beading, that remains a feature. Her latest forms are at once more ambitious and more subtle, the artist totally in control of her media. 

Butterly is creating artworks which can be appreciated fully from all sides. Her artworks have always been able to be contemplated in the round, but these pieces are striking in so far as they have no front, or frontal aspect, with each and every angle designed to give the viewer a perspective on the same object. 

Not surprisingly her new clay forms take almost twice as long to produce. Partly it is the scale shifts and complexity of designs, but simultaneously it is because she has allowed herself a greater freedom of decision making. Butterly attributes this change in part to a year of being at home, and deeper, unavoidable thoughts about life and art. 

Over the last 12 months she has renewed her interest in poetry and jazz, both highly improvisational, abstract art forms. The artist explains that in poetry and jazz she found a companion during protected periods of lockdown but also, creatively, a growing “comfort and freedom with abstraction rather than complete thought- rather than a song with words I felt connected to sound, to flow, staying away from fact and enjoying the freedom of not knowing.”

Symbolic connections between color and emotion can no doubt be made, for each piece seems to have its own temperament or mood. But that’s not the goal, just as pure abstraction conversely does not interest her. These objects are about feeling, about being human in the world—as complicated, painful, messy and joyous as that can be and often all at the same time.

Kathy Butterly received her MFA from the University of California, Davis and her BFA from Moore College of Art, Philadelphia. She has exhibited extensively and her work can be found in numerous museum collections including, MoMA, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX amongst many others. Butterly has been the recipient of prestigious awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship  (2017), Siena Art Institute Artist Fellowship (2017), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2014), the Moore College of Art & Design Visionary Woman Award (2013), the Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award (2012), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011) amongst many others.  In 2017, Butterly was inducted as a fellow into the National Academy of Design.  The artist lives and works in New York.