Sharon Butler

Sharon Butler (born 1959) is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay.^[1][2][3] Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life.^[4][5][6] In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay."^[7] Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."^[8]

From 2016 -2023, her canvases were based on small daily drawings that she made each day (2016-2020) in a phone app and posted on Instagram.^[9][10] In a 2018 conversation about the process of making paintings from these diminutive digital images, she said that the sense of surface and touch are inherent to a painting must be invented in the digital space. The images are never what they seem, especially when viewed on the phone."^[5] Critic Laurie Fendrich called Butler's work "beautiful and grittily compelling," suggesting in a 2021 review that her brushwork and color come out of her earlier casualist approach.The paintings "feel slightly off-balance, but not so much that they’re ugly. They’re actually just right: off-balance only enough to avoid cliché."^[11]

In a 2023 review in The Brooklyn Rail, Adam Simon wrote that Butler approaches geometric abstraction with an unusual restlessness and an idiosyncratic penchant for disequilibrium, and he declared that her paintings are full of "innuendo and wit."^[12]

She has said that at the root of her art practice is an effort to understand the relationship between emotion and intellect. "The tension between exacting, mechanical processes -- often digital and screen-based -- and the humanism inherent in handmade images and objects have always been stand-ins --  a visual metaphor -- in my work."