Exhibition

Benjamin Butler. Pinecones

23 Feb 2024 – 30 Mar 2024

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00
Thursday
11:00 – 18:00
Friday
11:00 – 18:00
Saturday
11:00 – 18:00
Sunday
Closed

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About

Benjamin Butler’s sixth solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery centers around a body of work that began taking shape shortly after his 2022 exhibition at the gallery’s Ludlow Street space. In that show, Butler had included a single painting of a pinecone, presented alongside paintings of flowers, mountain landscapes, a pine tree, and pixelated forests. It was in this pinecone motif that he discovered a new focus.

Over the next two years, Butler developed twelve paintings, each the same scale, using the image and structure of a pinecone as starting points.   His new paintings, based on the geometrically organized, often triangular ‘meta’ patterns inherent to the forms of pinecones, lend themselves to frameworks as varied as minimalism, folk art, Cubism, still life, and kitsch. This repetition of motif, combined with shifting levels of abstraction, allows Butler to create paintings that are both constrained by and liberated from concerns about ‘subject matter’. The rigor of Butler’s studio practice is unveiled through his working process, revealing ideas that visibly progress from one painting to the next.

For most of the past two decades, Benjamin Butler has painted, in varying manifestations, the regularly spaced verticals and diagonals of forests and lyrically curved branches of single trees. Whether reducing landscapes to single color canvases or grouping vertical green monochromes, his works have come to signify natural objects and/or the space around them.  Consistency can be found in Butler’s subjects as well as his deadpan handling of painting’s histories. Variety in the work comes by way of his ever-shifting approaches to his recurring subjects and painting processes.

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Benjamin Butler

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