Ben Butler’s exhibition for Clough-Hanson Gallery will bring together a number of recent drawings as well as two large scale sculptural works. The exhibition’s title comes from D’Arcy Whentworth Thompson’s book On Growth and Form from the early 1900s. Like the book, Butler’s work is a meditation on natural forms, how the shapes of objects from the natural world have an innate rightness to them. Through a variety of self-imposed parameters, the pieces in the show are the results of a series of experiments that were formed by the most intuitive of processes.
Ben Butler received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in Maine and went on to do his graduate work at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He has been included in many group shows across the country and has had a number of one person shows at Plane Space in New York and Zg Gallery in Chicago. He has been awarded the Pollock Krasner Grant as well as residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming and the MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, New Hampshire. In 2008 Ben Butler became the sculpture professor here at Rhodes College.