Kathy Butterly

Kathy Butterly’s ceramic sculptures reimagine the traditional vessel through forms that appear at once unstable and deeply idiosyncratic. Manipulating and distorting familiar ceramic structures, she pushes her works beyond functional form into highly expressive objects that balance humour, sensuality and unease. Through repeated firings and the meticulous layering of glaze, Butterly builds richly textured surfaces in which colour and materiality assume an almost painterly quality. Her sculptures move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, her collapsing, swelling and asymmetrical forms evoking a subtle sense of bodily presence.

Kathy Butterly was born in Amityville, New York in 1963. She received a BFA from Moore College of Art in 1986, followed by an MFA from the University of California in 1990. Butterly is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2009); the Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award (2012); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). Major solo exhibitions include Kathy Butterly at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2007); ColorForm at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis (2019); and Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many / Headscapes at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2021), which travelled to the Portland Museum of Art, Portland (2022). Her work has also been included in significant group exhibitions including Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2005); and The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021). Butterly’s work is held in major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington. She currently lives and works in New York and Maine.