USA
* May 7, 1949 San Diego
American artist Deborah Butterfield is best known for her horse sculptures made from found objects and natural materials such as wood and recycled metal. While her first animals were made of plaster, papier-mâché and mud, she soon discovered scrap metal and iron for her sculptures, giving the horses a more industrial look. The artist also formed horses from collected pieces of wood – branches, roots, driftwood – which she assembled like a three-dimensional puzzle.
In the mid-1980s, Butterfield discovered the possibilities of casting the wooden sculptures in bronze, preserving the original wood structure and the aesthetics of the rotten wood with astonishing detail during the casting process.
Although the works recognizably depict horses, they are mostly abstract; the artist waives anatomically perfect presentation, focusing instead on form and posture. Butterfield’s horses are not idealized or romanticized, but often in calm, standing poses – vulnerable, contemplative or introspective. They thus form a strong contrast to the mostly furious warhorses in the visual arts of past centuries.
