Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: jessicasilvermangallery.com/luke-butler
Luke Butler was born in 1971 in San Francisco, California, where he continues to live and work. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York in 1993 and an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2008. He is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Norton Museum of Art.
Butler is a figurative painter with a cinematic sensibility, producing meticulous acrylic paintings that combine film and television imagery, text, landscape, and portraiture in compositions that feel like the opening or closing frame of a story never told. His early Star Trek and Starsky and Hutch paintings depicted iconic figures at moments of wounding or vulnerability; later series introduced the phrase “THE END” or producer credits floating over seascapes and cityscapes, appropriating cinema’s conventions of conclusion as a meditation on mortality. His most recent work — Overture paintings of San Francisco cityscapes and shorelines — uses the city’s architecture and light as a film stage, inserting himself and his peers as characters in an ongoing urban noir. Throughout, his work plays with the tension between still image and narrative: a single frame implying everything that happened before and after.
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