Eric Butcher
[1] He currently shows with Toomey Tourell gallery, San Francisco,[2] Galerie Robert Drees in Hannover[3] and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art.
Butcher was shortlisted in the final Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2017[6] (now Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize) alongside artists such as Barbara Walker (artist) and selected by writer/curator, David Dibosa; Helen Legg, director of Tate Liverpool (then director of Spike Island Artspace); and Michael Simpson (painter).
In 2020 Butcher exhibited Sweet Heresy,[7] his second solo show at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, which coincided with the release of Time Trial, a newly published 160-page hardback catalogue of his recent work.
He has worked for the past twenty years from a rural setting in his studio in Oxfordshire[9] a converted barn and a place of tranquility, creativity and precision.
[11] Although characterised by their appearance – an abstract ‘accretion of paint, resin and various other fluids’[12] - their manufacture was faithful to the rules that govern Butcher's creative process.
[13] Butcher has said of his practice that ‘the application or subtraction of paint as a set of processes is achieved through a variety of continually evolving techniques which draw attention to the physical properties of my materials’,[14] a result that would be most clearly manifest in his subsequent metal works.
[19] Hung vertically and spaced asymmetrically with a measured and careful distance between one another,[19] the display articulated Butcher's increasing awareness of, and preoccupation with, ‘installation’ in creating a total cohesive experience rather than an isolated object.
[14] As Kenneth Baker, in his San Francisco Chronicle review, wrote of the work's interaction with the space it occupied, ‘to walk this piece is to compose and recompose it through observation.
[19] This can also be said of Butcher's curatorial practice, where, as in the Definite Article exhibition curated by the artist himself,[24] he deals with the scale and arrangement of works by Roger Ackling, Marc Vaux and Cathy Wade, as well as his own.
Like the intimate relationship between painted surface and objects that distinguish his work, they become 'a pause in the act or a mistake in the material',[25] 'subtle and stunning, installed in space dispersed over corners, corridors or in staircases they become architecture in motion'.
Then he became interested in how the spent energy had left its marks, especially as those traces were – in line with the aims of his wider practice – free from the subjectivity of creative decision making'.
Butcher's creative practice has also embraced curating; initiating exhibitions/projects including Emission (2001), Definite Article (2005/6), Underground (2007), The Devil Finds Work for Idle Hands (2012) and A Machine Aesthetic (2013/14).
A Machine Aesthetic (co-curated with Simón Granell), was a major national touring exhibition presenting the work of 11 contemporary British artists whose creative practices engaged with the concept of mechanisation.
The exhibition explored the various manifestations, uses and influences of different aspects of mechanisation within the practices of an otherwise diverse group of artists (with Andrew Bracey, Eric Butcher, David Connearn, Rob Currie, Paul Goodfellow, Simón Granell, Emma Hart (artist), Dan Hays, Natasha Kidd, Tim Knowles, Michael Roberts).
