EXHIBITION RECORD

Deborah Butterfield

Saturday, August 28, 2004 through Sunday, January 2, 2005

This exhibit, organized by the Yellowstone Art Museum, offers a comprehensive overview of internationally acclaimed Montana sculptor, Deborah Butterfield, showcasing her magnificent horse sculptures and celebrating the release of the first major academic survey of the artist’s work and career authored by Robert Gordon.

An enormously popular and significant American sculptor, Deborah Butterfield first gained wide notice at the 1979 Whitney Biennial. Horses have been the single, sustained focus of Butterfield’s work for over 20 years—a remarkably prolonged, disciplined and ultimately poetic inquiry into our relationship with the organic world, with other life forms and with us. Her early work, fragile forms created from mud, sticks and straw, as well as full-sized horses constructed of sticks and found metal, evoked 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 in bronze. The horses in this show are on loan from the artist’s personal collection, and have rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.