Deborah Butterfield
Deborah Butterfield transforms pieces of scrap metal and found wood into majestic life-size and small-scale horse sculptures that explore the essence and spirit of the horse.
Horses have been the single focus of Butterfield’s work for over twenty years—a remarkably prolonged, disciplined and ultimately poetic inquiry into our relationship with the organic other world, with other life forms, and with ourselves.
Her early works, first begun in 1973, are fragile forms created from mud, sticks, and straw as well as full-sized horses constructed of sticks and found metal, evoking horses either standing or resting on the ground. Since the mid-1980s she has been creating full-size and smaller works from sticks and branches, and casting the finished sculpture into bronze.
Butterfield says of her work, “I guess that my work with the real horse is so much about language and that my art has to do with imagining another form of life. It’s that empathy; I’m trying to get the viewer to project himself or herself into the form of the horse.”
This presentation of Butterfield’s extraordinary sculpture is her first major traveling exhibition. Organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, the grouping of eleven major works is primarily drawn from the artist’s own collection which is rarely seen in public.
The Tucson portion of this exhibition is made possible by the generosity of the Stonewall Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson Pima Arts council, First National Bank of Arizona, John K. and Aline Goodman, Arnie and Tonie Jacobsen, and the John W. and Helen G. Murphey Foundation with additional support by Hotel Arizona and Ellen Walling Lewis.
