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Lot Essay
The ethereal beauty of Deborah Butterfield’s evocative horse sculptures belies their solidity. These sculptures, though cast in bronze, retain the delicate organic nature of wood. In the negative spaces left between the cast branches, kinetic energy defines musculature and movement. At once stately and joyful, there is a genuine tactile and animal quality to their poses, delicate hooves grounding the forking branches that form their skeletons.
Butterfield’s horses have grown in size and stature since the artist’s first began to cast her found wood sculptures in metal, but they retain the natural lightness of those horses shaped in mud, sticks and clay from earlier in her career, in 1970s. Until recently both of the present works have been on extended loan to the Honolulu Museum of Art, where they stood proudly in front of the museum’s building caught in a graceful moment as each appears about to extend its neck to graze.
Though Butterfield’s sculptures appear familiar, they retain a dynamic freshness. As critic Grace Glueck wrote in the New York Times in 2004, Butterfield’s fascination with the horse persists and provides ample space for reinterpretation: “…they still have a freshness, which comes from the artist's regard for them as individuals… She thinks of them as personifications of herself...They seem to express the very spirit of equine existence” (G. Glueck, "Art in Review: Deborah Butterfield," New York Times, January 16, 2004). This fundamental animal essence gives these monumental figures movement and liveliness, and provides fertile territory for the artist’s creativity.
Butterfield’s horses have grown in size and stature since the artist’s first began to cast her found wood sculptures in metal, but they retain the natural lightness of those horses shaped in mud, sticks and clay from earlier in her career, in 1970s. Until recently both of the present works have been on extended loan to the Honolulu Museum of Art, where they stood proudly in front of the museum’s building caught in a graceful moment as each appears about to extend its neck to graze.
Though Butterfield’s sculptures appear familiar, they retain a dynamic freshness. As critic Grace Glueck wrote in the New York Times in 2004, Butterfield’s fascination with the horse persists and provides ample space for reinterpretation: “…they still have a freshness, which comes from the artist's regard for them as individuals… She thinks of them as personifications of herself...They seem to express the very spirit of equine existence” (G. Glueck, "Art in Review: Deborah Butterfield," New York Times, January 16, 2004). This fundamental animal essence gives these monumental figures movement and liveliness, and provides fertile territory for the artist’s creativity.