Kathy Butterly: Enter
February 27 – April 12, 2014

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present its fifth solo exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Kathy Butterly.
The exhibition will comprise seventeen new works. As in the past, the sculptures are made of clay, earthenware and glaze and are never larger than nine inches in height. Most of the pieces are open vessels and then a few are closed forms. Some are upright while others lean over, folded into themselves. They appear outward and inward at once, where each seems like its own cosmos.

The new group of sculptures continues her adventure in clay. The pieces retain their exquisite detail and their synthesis of both Asian art and California Funk: intimacy, humor, and elegance, all at once. The works are all very inventive and unique, in what seems like an endless well of ideas. Unlike works in the past this new body of work plays tight and loose off of each other. The vessels are controlled and technically brilliantly conceived. That control is in contrast to the glazes which are often loosely applied, full of drips, crackling, and layering.

Butterly received a B.F.A. from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, where she studied with Robert Arneson. A 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, her work is represented in numerous museum collections including The Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. In 2012 the artist received the prestigious Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Contemporary Artist Award.