작품 상세

Kelly Canyon, 2016 Cast Bronze, unique work 86.5 x 98.5 x 27 in (219.7 x 250.2 x 68.6 cm) Deborah Butterfield B. 1949, California, USA “My friend Greta Ehrlich wrote a book Facing the Wave and the title ‘Three Sorrows’ came from a phrase of hers: ‘Three sorrows: earthquake, tsunami, meltdown’ – which I think sums up our environmental disasters, and why I made this piece. A lot of the collected debris drifted to the shores of Alaska specifically from the tsunami in Japan five years ago. In this work, I thought it was very important to have the veracity of the actual objects that went through that experience. The horse, to me, has always been female, and in the body of this particular piece with the blue fishing barrel torn into pieces, I see it as the ocean and continents and a literal metaphor for what we’ve done to the Earth. That’s what this horse is. It’s telling us what we have done to the environment, and to species who don’t have actual voice boxes to tell us. But they’re telling us, we’re just not listening.” - Deborah Butterfield Internationally renowned for her representations of horses in sculpture, Deborah Butterfield portrays the energy and emotion of nature through an emphasis on formal line and structure. Since the 1970s, Butterfield’s sole motif has been the horse, and through her expansive oeuvre of stylized small and large-scale works, she has encapsulated the symbolic freedom and strength of the animal. Butterfield imbues each sculpture with an individual sense of character; the works can be seen as anthropomorphic, with a distinctive spirit that emerges from each unique composition. As the artist once described of her subject, “I first used the horse as a metaphorical substitute for myself – it was a way of doing a self-portrait, one step away from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield”. Butterfield began her practice using natural materials – clay, mud, wood — and subsequently, started working with found materials, employing barbed wire, metal and wood together. Her recent sculptures incorporate plastic detritus collected from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. In the pairing of natural wood with manmade refuse, the artist foregrounds the delicate balance of our environment, and the increasingly common phenomena of natural disasters in our current age. In her process, Butterfield harvests found wood from nature, builds the wood elements into a singular composition, casts the work into bronze, and gives each work a special patina that creates a lifelike wood quality. Kelly Canyon was originally composed from wood sourced close to her home and studio in Bozeman, Montana; the surrounding areas nearby have been devastated by fires in recent years due to climate change. The development of Butterfield’s sculptural practice also captures the mystique of the American West. Representing the freedom of manifest destiny and the possibility of the American Dream, Western motifs such as the horse mark the evolution of temporal and spatial opportunity. This sense of sovereignty is evident in the balance between formalism and malleability in Kelly Canyon and highlights the marriage of animalistic and human experience. Courtesy of Deborah Butterfield and L.A. Louver Venice, California Fair Market Value: $450,000