Sharon Butler

Theodore:Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Sharon Butler.

For the past few years, Butler has produced daily drawings on her phone. The Good Morning Drawings, digital sketches uploaded to Instagram, reflect the peripatetic experience of a contemporary painter with a complex life—teaching, traveling, parenting, working. The small geometric abstractions serve as foundational ideas on which to build firm structures that investigate painting and its discontents more thoroughly in the context of a complex and chaotic world.

In March of this year, during the Covid lockdown in New York City, Butler had the chance to reflect on personal and socio-political anxiety as refracted by the diaristic nature of the Good Morning Drawing series of the recent past. The time in the studio was quieter, oriented towards a kind of distillation of paramount issues and aspects of the artist’s life and world view -- a kind of slow breathing exercise of the mind. This show represents an exhale of relief. We are still here, Butler still finds the lifeblood of painting closely connected to the roller coaster of the experience of daily life.

A painter and arts writer, Sharon Butler is widely known as the founder of Two Coats of Paint, a project which includes an influential art blog, an artist residency, and other initiatives. She has shown work at Theodore:Art (2016, 2018) and Season (Seattle). Thanks to the generosity of the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program, Butler maintains a studio in Brooklyn, under the Manhattan Bridge. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital/The Warhol Foundation’s Art Writers Program, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,Yaddo, Connecticut Commission for the Arts, and Counterproof Press. She currently teaches at the New York Academy of Art and in the MFA program at the University of Connecticut. Her exhibitions at Theodore in 2016 and 2018 have received critical attention from Time Out NY, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, and New York Magazine.