Benjamin Butler (artist)

Last updated

Benjamin Butler (born April 20, 1975) is an American artist, based in Vienna, Austria.

Contents

Biography

Born in Westmoreland, Kansas and raised in Wamego, Kansas, Butler studied painting at Emporia State University before attending graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to earn his Masters of Fine Arts in 2000. He subsequently moved to New York City, having his first solo show of paintings at Team Gallery in 2002. He soon earned critical accolades [1] for his paintings of mountains and trees, and followed with international exhibitions in New York City, Toronto, Tokyo, Vienna, London, Berlin, Austin, Basel, Beijing, and Los Angeles. He is currently represented by Tomio Koyama in Tokyo and Klaus von Nichtssagend in New York.

Ken Johnson described his work in The New York Times in 2005: "Mr. Butler is toying like a Pop artist with conventions of early 20th-century abstraction...he also revels in painting as an end in itself; so he and we get to have it both ways: we can be both knowing intellectuals and paint-loving hedonists". [2] Writer Roberta Smith has written about his work that "Few representational painters have managed to rid themselves of quite so much representation and still make pictures." [3] Will Heinrich has written, also in The New York Times: "Mr. Butler has narrowed his focus even further, to thrillingly psychedelic effect: His work now seems balanced on a razor blade between Conceptual practice and “The Starry Night,” but at the same time, somehow, it has ample room to move." [4]

Related Research Articles

Mark Ryden American painter (born 1963)

Mark Ryden is an American painter who is considered to be part of the Lowbrow art movement. He was dubbed "the god-father of pop surrealism" by Interview magazine. Artnet named Ryden and his wife, the painter Marion Peck, the King and Queen of Pop Surrealism and one of the ten most important art couples in Los Angeles.

Tom Friedman (artist) American conceptual sculptor (born 1965)

Tom Friedman is an American conceptual sculptor. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri and received a BFA in graphic illustration from Washington University in St. Louis (1988) and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1990.). As a conceptual artist he works in diverse media including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installation.

Inka Essenhigh American painter

Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.

Ronnie Landfield American abstract painter

Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.

David Ratcliff is a painter based in Los Angeles. He spray paints collages using appropriated images.

Tim Lokiec

Tim Lokiec is an artist based in New York City whose 2003 solo debut artworks were praised by The New York Times for their "remarkable visual and emotional intensity". In 2004, he was cited by London's Frieze Art Fair as being one of the world's most exciting artists who were nominated by 200 leading contemporary art galleries in the world. In 2006, the Kantor Feuer Gallery, known for discovering new talent and developing the careers of artists, and ranked as one of the top galleries in the world, held an exhibition of Lokiec's work. His works are also exhibited in the now British government-owned Saatchi Gallery. Lokiec did the cover design for Rich Bowering's 2011 book Big Fire at Spahn Ranch.

Donald Baechler was an American painter and sculptor associated with 1980s Neo-expressionism. He had lived in Manhattan and Stephentown, New York.

Franz West

Franz West was an Austrian artist.

Greg Colson American painter

Greg Colson is an American artist best known for works that straddle the line between painting and sculpture that address concepts of efficiency and order. Using scavenged materials, Colson allows the physicality of his makeshift constructions to intrude on the precise systems he paints or draws upon their surfaces - striking a balance between subject and context, image and support, order and chaos.

Christopher Wool is an American artist. Since the 1980s, Wool's art has incorporated issues surrounding post-conceptual ideas. He lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas, together with his wife and fellow painter Charline von Heyl.

James Siena is an American contemporary artist. His art is typically created through a series of self-imposed constraints also sometimes referred to as visual algorithms —rules Siena decides on before sitting down to work. In most of his work he establishes a basic unit and action and repeats it indefinitely. While originally recognized for his paintings using enamel paints on aluminum plates, Siena has also become known for his drawings, prints, typed works on paper using vintage typewriters, and sculpture. Sculptures have ranged from made with his own hands using common materials such as: toothpicks, bamboo skewers bound with string, and grape vines to his larger sculptures that have been realized in bronze and wood in partnership with the Walla Walla Foundry. He is based in New York City.

Ian Pedigo American artist

Ian Pedigo, is a sculptor, image and installation-based artist and writer living and working in New York, NY (Queens). His artwork involves merging natural materials with the synthetic, as well as the experience of material and image-based aesthetics as acts of discovery, creation, and recovery. His works can be perceived as premeditated artifacts of an archaeological nature, found within the context of the near-present while appearing as discrete aesthetic objects in their own right. He classifies his work as dealing with a "modal environs", referring to an art produced within an aesthetics-based ecology similar to the Vibrant Matter and Ecology of Matter of Jane Bennett. He received his Master of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin with concentrations in installation, sculpture, and communications. He also participated in the 2001 Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Art, studying with Ilya Kabakov & Emilia Kabakov and the theorist/critic Boris Groys.

Alexi Worth is a painter, curator, art critic, and writer who is known for his conceptually rich and visually graphic works that address modern life and artmaking. He is currently represented by DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Amy Feldman is an American abstract painter from Brooklyn, New York.

Alex Dodge

Alex Dodge is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Dodge’s work is included in many important public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY, The New York Public Library, NY, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. Alex Dodge is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.

Dona Nelson American painter

Dona Nelson is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in Art in America and Artforum credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."

Elena Sisto is an American painter based in New York.

Richard Bosman is an American artist, educator, and illustrator. Bosman is best known for his paintings and prints. His work is often related to crime, adventure, and disaster narratives; rural Americana; and nature and domestic themes. He is associated with the Neo-expressionist movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bosman was a member of Colab, the New York artist collective founded in 1977, and participated in the group's influential, “Times Square Show” (1980).

Harriet Korman American painter

Harriet Korman is an American abstract painter based in New York City, who first gained attention in the early 1970s. She is known for work that embraces improvisation and experimentation within a framework of self-imposed limitations that include simplicity of means, purity of color, and a strict rejection of allusion, illusion, naturalistic light and space, or other translations of reality. Writer John Yau describes Korman as "a pure abstract artist, one who doesn’t rely on a visual hook, cultural association, or anything that smacks of essentialization or the spiritual," a position he suggests few post-Warhol painters have taken. While Korman's work may suggest early twentieth-century abstraction, critics such as Roberta Smith locate its roots among a cohort of early-1970s women artists who sought to reinvent painting using strategies from Process Art, then most associated with sculpture, installation art and performance. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have championed this early work as unjustifiably neglected by a male-dominated 1970s art market and deserving of rediscovery.

John Newman is an American sculptor. He was born in Flushing, Queens in 1952. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College (1973). He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1972 and received his M.F.A. in 1975 from the Yale School of Art. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT from 1975 to 1978. He is based in New York City.

References

  1. Smith, Roberta (2002-12-20). "ART IN REVIEW; Benjamin Butler--'Mountain Paintings'". The New York Times .
  2. Johnson, Ken (2005-06-03). "ART IN REVIEW; Benjamin Butler". The New York Times.
  3. Smith, Roberta (2014-05-16). "ART IN REVIEW; Benjamin Butler 'Green Forest'". The New York Times.
  4. Heinrich, Will (2016-11-03). "What to See in New York Galleries This Week". The New York Times.