Deborah Butterfield: New Sculpture

Haines proudly presents Deborah Butterfield: New Sculpture, the gallery's debut exhibition with the celebrated American artist. The exhibition features a selection of Butterfield's signature equine sculptures, constructed from wood and cast in bronze, and marks her first solo showing in San Francisco in more than a decade. 

  

For over fifty years, Butterfield has relayed a love of horses into a sculptural practice known for its craftsmanship, material experimentation, and nuanced depictions of a singular, recurring subject. Deborah Butterfield: New Sculpture premieres Whitebird (2023-24), a dense construction of bronze driftwood that ineffably coheres into a majestic, life-sized creature. The exhibition also features a selection of smaller sculptures, each measuring two- to three-feet tall. Presented on pedestals,  these new works are created from the fallen branches of indigenous Hawaiian trees — ohia, 'a'ali'i, and lama — collected from the artist's home on the island of Hawaii, where she spends part of the year. 

 

These bronze horses are the result of an intricate casting process described by the writer Laurie Delk as "a tour de force of convincing falsehood as bronze takes on the attributes of wood." Butterfield creates her sculptures intuitively, responding to the natural properties and expressive potential of each branch, twig, and log, building and bending until they form the skeletal outline and musculature of a horse. These individual components are then cast in bronze, and finally patinated to achieve the appearance of worn, weathered wood. 

 

Butterfield's masterful sculptures invite us to consider both the whole and its parts, a gestural sketch of a horse imbued with a striking sense of its own character and presence. Poised and powerful, these graceful forms reject equestrian statuary traditions and pastoral cliches, serving as both thoughtful portraits — of specific horses, of friends and family, of Butterfield herself — and metaphors for the beauty and vulnerability of nature, and our connection with animals, the earth, and with each other.