Opening reception: October 21, 6–8 pm
Lora Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Benjamin Butler.
"His strange little paintings are at once conservative and experimental, as the best of them hold your attention more than you initially expect. Their mildly hallucinatory colors, economic brushwork and descriptive abbreviations counter the vast spaces implied by the artist's Northern Romantic subjects."
–Roberta Smith, The New York Times
Benjamin Butler is recognized for his colorful and energetic abstractions of landscapes. The exhibition, New Trees and Forests, will include ten paintings on canvas and will feature portraits of trees imbedded in pulsating lines and dashes of color. Borrowing from formal conventions of modernist painting, Butler systematically transforms forests into a series of vertical lines and sunsets into simplified blocks of color.
His sources are a wide-ranging pastiche of personal snapshots, stock photos, Hallmark cards and paintings by other artists including those of the Hudson River School, Mondrian and Bob Ross. Butler pays homage to the tradition of plein-air painting in presenting us with traditional easel-sized paintings, while the larger and more pattern based paintings reference minimalist stripe and colorfield painting. These idiosyncratic landscapes have more than a formalist intent – they are an affirmation of the beauty of nature, modernist ideals, and the tradition of painting.
Benjamin Butler was born in Westmoreland, Kansas in 1975. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in many exhibitions both nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in esteemed publications including ArtForum, The New York Times, and The Village Voice.