BEN BUTLER: New Sculptures & Works on Paper February 28, 2008

ARTIST RECEPTION: Friday, Feb. 29th, 5:00-7:30pm

Ben Butler’s recent sculptures and works on paper are the products of elaborately developed or divined systems – systems of production, seeing, thinking, moving, and primarily systems of construction and invention. In Butler’s estimation, systems are at the very base of understanding the nature of everything in the physical world.

Through a combination of observation and innovation, an overriding set of guidelines are established. These rules determine where one line intersects another, the sequence for reoccurring shapes, the exponential progression, or repeated division of the original object. Flaws in the system lend a human element to the work; as in the rough hewn wood with visible joints and glue residue of a sculpture, or the inevitable shift in the grid of a drawing. Discovering the rhyme and reason for a particular set of systemic parameters creates a framework for replicating or developing a new set of rules, and subsequently a new object or drawing.

Ben Butler received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and his B.A. in Visual Arts from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Butler is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has completed artist’s residencies at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and at the Vermont Studio Center. This will be Ben Butler’s third solo show with Zg Gallery, in Chicago.

Official Website: http://www.zggallery.com/butler.htm