January 8-February 17, 2013
Pocket Utopia
191 Henry Street
New York, NY

Contact: Austin Thomas
Email: ats@toast.net
Phone: 212-375-8532.

Gallery Hours: Wed. - Sun. 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Directions: Pocket Utopia is located between Clinton and Jefferson on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By subway, the F train to East Broadway is 2 blocks away. Map

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From the press release:

Pocket Utopia is pleased to present “Precisionist Casual,” a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sharon Butler. The exhibition, on view January 6 - February 17, will feature Butler’s stapled, washed canvases, unstretched yet arranged on stretchers.

Butler finds herself pulled between the worldly confines of the Precisionists of the early twentieth century and the fey liberation of today’s Casualist abstraction. Like the Precisionists, Butler is drawn to urban settings, structures, and HVAC architecture – all in evidence from the windows of her Bushwick studio. Yet, like the Casualists, she seeks a mode of presentation that evokes more than the triumphs and laments of industrialization that earlier artists have already plumbed so well, embracing those inconsistent realities and searching for new ones.

In Butler’s new work, stretchers are no longer hidden, voiceless platforms for paintings but rather partially revealed elements of the work, haphazardly wrapped with wrinkled tarps. The resulting Rauschenbergian sense of earthy imperfection and chaos, though, is balanced by well-anchored painting distinguished by skewed perspective, geometric structure, sensitivity to form, minimalist economy of detail, and worn-out pastels.

With a sensibility that resists serial rigor and jettisons the notion that you can get everything right, Butler fully realizes her belief that the most interesting and enduring stories are imperfect and incomplete, showcasing an appealingly unresolved tension between restless impetuosity and grounded rigor. Her new paintings seamlessly combine the irresoluteness of contemporary abstraction with the confidence of the Modern.

Since 2009, Sharon Butler has exhibited at SEASON (Seattle, WA), John Davis Gallery (Hudson, NY), STOREFRONT (Brooklyn, NY), and Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT). In addition to painting, Butler publishes the award-winning art blog Two Coats of Paint and has contributed to The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.  She divides her time between New York City and southeastern Connecticut.  "Precisionist Casual" is her first solo show at Pocket Utopia.

Press for the show:

Thomas Micchelli, "When Paintings Come Apart: Sharon Butler on the Inside Out" Hyperallergic, January, 12, 2013.

James Panero, "Gallery Chronicle," The New Criterion, February 2013.

Whitney Kimball, "This Week's Must-See Art Events: Extreme Hangover Edition," The L Magazine, December 31, 2012.

Joanne Mattera,"Canvasing the Neighborhoods,"Joanne Mattera Art Blog, February 24, 2013.

Paul D'Agostino, "Art Picks from Print,"The L Magazine, January 31, 2013.

Elisabeth Condon,"Sharon Butler and 'Precisionist Casual' at Pocket Utopia," Raggedy Ann's Foot, Febraury 25, 2013.

I'm moderating a panel discussion at the SVA Theater on Tuesday, October 16, 2012, 7pm

Press release: The Office of Development and Alumni Affairs at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Taking Custody: The Double Life of the Artist Mother, a panel discussion among visual artists who are also mothers. Artist, educator and blogger Sharon L. Butler  will moderate a conversation with alumni Suzanne McClelland (MFA 1989 Fine Arts), Katherine Bernhardt, (MFA 2000 Fine Arts), Rachel Papo (MFA 2005 Photography, Video and Related Media) and Amy Stein (MFA 2006 Photography, Video and Related Media) and faculty member Danica Phelps. The artists will discuss their experiences negotiating the demands of the commercial art world with those of motherhood. The event will take place on Tuesday, October 16, 7pm at the SVA Theatre (333 West 23 Street). Admission is free and open to the public.

To see a video of the discussion, click here.

Image above: Mary Cassatt, Tea, 1880, oil on canvas, 25½ × 36¼ inches. Mary Cassatt, although famous for her depictions of mothers with their children, never married or had kids of her own. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Sharon Butler: Gone Wrong," 

September 20 through November 11, 2012.
Opening reception: Thursday, September 20.

Visually, my new work is rooted in the world nearby – specifically, the idiosyncratic HVAC structures, cement-mixing machines, jerry-built sheds, and improvised building additions that surround my Bushwick studio. A minimalist sensibility resists serial rigor and jettisons the notion that you can get everything right. For me, the most interesting stories are about things gone wrong.

REAL ART WAYS / 56 Arbor St / Hartford, CT 06106 / 860.232.1006

http://www.realartways.org/

Image above:

Please stop by the studio during the Go Brooklyn Open Studio Weekend on Saturday & Sunday, September 8th & 9th, from 11am - 7pm. No need to register or vote just stop by and say hello. New work for my upcoming show at Real Art Ways will be on display before I pack it up the following week. If you want to learn more about how you can help the Brooklyn Museum curate a show during the open studios, click here.

Location: 117 Grattan Street #419, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY.

At The Brooklyn Rail this month, Elizabeth Baker, former editor of Art in America, served as guest editor to the Art section, asking contributors to consider the question, "What's new?" Writing in her introduction she suggested that

Among the artists, words like “progress,” “innovation,” and “originality” barely crop up. Yet it’s clear that today’s artists are taking the conditions of the art world and the society in which they live and finding ways to make art that is distinctly their own. That, for them, is what “new” means. Perhaps it’s time to give up the expectation of a millennial eruption of novel forms and/or strategies and look critically and carefully at what actually surrounds us.