Kathy Butterly

ColorForm is the first major monograph on the work of New York sculptor Kathy Butterly (born 1963). Encompassing 60 sculptures and 20 drawings from throughout Butterly’s career, all of which are reproduced here, it focuses mainly on the last ten years of her work.

Butterly is well known for her sculptures that challenge the conventions of ceramic tradition through oblique figurations of the body, with shapes that evoke mouths, feet and genitalia. Her work, which stands in historical dialogue with that of Ken Price, Viola Frey and Robert Arneson, engages with the politics of 20th-century femininity even as it leans ever closer to abstraction.

The works collected here chart the evolution of Butterly’s sensibilities and philosophical stance, tracking the development of her highly personal yet immediate and accessible ceramic language from explorations of the body to personhood and autobiography.