Reg Butler at Kent - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Reg Butler who died in 1981 was an English sculptor of the generation that came to prominence during the post-war years. Lynn Chadwick, Germaine Richier and, greatest in quantity importantly, Alberto Giacometti were his equals Throughout the 1940s he made forged and welded-steel personages which the American viewer might mistake for the early work of David Smith. However, by the agency of the '50s Butler had move rounded away from the open construction of these abstract figures and get backed to the problem of enclos turns with a fuller human neighborhood He forged partial figures that were oftentimes caught or suspended in a wiry make "like a kite on a string," in his phrase. During the last 10 years of his working life, he abandoned carburet of iron altogether and modeled a locate of obsessively complete female unclotheds cast in bronze with inset resin organ of visions real hair wigs and carefully painted muscle and fat tones. Four of these "naked ladies" (as he referr to them) were shown at Pierre Matisse Gallery, fresh York, in 1973 and have been in mothballs at any time since. The Kent Gallery brought them without of storage for the actual good reason that they gaze as if they were made yesterday. They near a bracing challenge to the entire concourse of contemporary sculptors who have been gingerly toying with the moot point of human figuration.

Butler introduced the mete "postmodern" in 1962 predicting, in a discourse on his work, the imminent arrival of of that kind a movement, and his painted ladies are certainly more [i]or[/i] less of the very first postmodern plastic arts They are still arrestingly strange. Girl Bending (1968-71) is an over-life-size figure bent forward at the waist, face tilting up from the extremity of a wide tubular neck with the pair hands clenched on her raised target as if grabbing a double fistful of muscle and fat Her flattened face has a pug nose, protruding gather into wrinkles [i]or[/i] foldsed lips and a clear wide forehead. She stands upon a raised pedestal and stares without intently over our heads. All the convolutions of her body seem to have individual identities, which are just barely held together through her taut painted skin. Her hips balloon, the planes of her chest reduce into an abstract armor, her navel is a of great depth cavern. In fact Butler did not work from observation of a type These figures are inventions upon the deepest level, made up in parts and assembled like a big doll. The oscillation between an aggressively real vicinity and a mannequinlike absence is startling.

The other three plastic arts are reclining nudes splayed on the outside on striped cushions (also bronze) in postures that mimic what Butler called the "disarray of sexual activity." The artist insisted--sincerely, I think--that he had no intention to percussion Nevertheless, these figures are really great exemplars of Kenneth Clark's "alternate convention"--the northern European tradition, from van Eyck to Lucian Freud in which a deep-seated fear of the material part goes head-to-head with an equally overwhelming attraction to the living flesh

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