Benjamin Butler

For painter Benjamin Butler, trees serve as an iconographic trope and permits a point of embarkation to explore various methodologies of artistic production. He approaches the tree as a signifier that allows him to paint a gamut of forms and languages while remaining anchored to a single motif. In this way, he is able to maneuver between modernism and post-pop representational painting, while developing a complex language that hearkens back to Milton Avery and Piet Mondrian. Butler’s trees are pushed in various formal directions that include reducing them to simple fields of color, painting maelstroms of directional brushstrokes invoking swaying limbs, and composing two-dimensional branching systems that fill a canvas whole.

He has participated in several group and solo exhibitions at such institutions as Team Gallery in New York, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Galerie Martin Janda in Vienna, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, Greenberg van Doren Gallery in New York, The Nerman Museum in Overland Park, and PS1/MOMA’s Greater New York.

Courtesy of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery