Deborah Butterfield: New Work

For more than fifty years, Butterfield has dedicated her artistic practice to the exploration of material and a seemingly inexhaustible subject: the horse. Her sculptures begin as intricate assemblages of driftwood, branches, and twigs that are cast in bronze through a painstaking process that preserves the texture and character of the original materials. The resulting works possess an extraordinary duality: at once abstract and representational, they appear to be made of wood even as they embody the permanence and strength of metal. 

Deborah Butterfield: New Work includes the commanding, life-sized Kákini (2026), whose sweeping, interwoven branches describe a powerful yet remarkably graceful form. Kákini is one of several new sculptures created from manzanita branches that Butterfield sourced from gallery principal Cheryl Haines’ property in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and retains the wood’s reddish-brown hue and distinctive polish. Other works in the exhibition were created from driftwood gathered in Montana, woody sage from Wyoming, and 'O'hia branches from Hawaii, with which Butterfield achieves an extraordinary range of posture, expression, and attitude.

In Butterfield's hands, wood becomes both structural element and expressive gesture, its twists, bends, and textures suggesting muscle, movement, and the complexities of living anatomy. At a time when our relationships with the natural world feel increasingly urgent, her sculptures offer a moving meditation on the connections between humans, animals, and the environments we inhabit.