Eric Butcher (born 1970) is a contemporary British abstract painter known for his reductive, processed-based approach.
Butcher read philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in 1994 and completed an MA in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art in 2001. He has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally with shows in Germany, Italy, Australia and the USA. He currently shows with Toomey Tourell gallery, San Francisco, Galerie Robert Drees in Hannover and Patrick Heide Contemporary Art.
He has received awards from the Arts Council, England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has also held an Arts Institute at Bournemouth Research Fellowship (now the AUB) and the Centre for Arts International Research/Liverpool College of Art & Design, Liverpool John Moores University, Multiple Perspectives Fellowship (2007).
In 2002 Butcher was the recipient of Art London: Visual Arts Development Award, and Artist in Residence, Benson-Sedgwick Engineering, London from 2008 to 2010.
Butcher was shortlisted in the final Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2017 (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, 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.
Early life and education
Eric Butcher was born in Singapore in 1970 to a Dutch mother and British father. Shortly after he was born the family moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and then settled in the UK in Hampshire, England in 1974. After leaving school at 16 he spent two formative years studying art at Basingstoke College of Technology, after which he undertook A Levels at evening classes and eventually found his way to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, reading philosophy and graduating in 1994. After several years of developing his work in relative isolation he returned to art school and in 2001 he completed an MA in Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art. He has worked for the past twenty years from a rural setting in his studio in Oxfordshire a converted barn and a place of tranquility, creativity and precision.
Career
Early work
Butcher's earliest exhibited works were compositions of oil, resin and spray paint on large, tablet-like MDF supports. The combination of painted surface and exaggerated depth of the support made the works deliberately and obviously three-dimensional objects – an ‘attempt to deny the viewer the desire to see the surface as anything other than surface’. This composed physical presence was inherent in even the most restrained of Butcher's works, as William Packer would go on to say in his introduction to Butcher's 2005 catalogue, Carbon Candy, ‘even when hung conventionally, flat to the wall, they remain obviously and directly physical’. Although characterised by their appearance – an abstract ‘accretion of paint, resin and various other fluids’ - their manufacture was faithful to the rules that govern Butcher's creative process. 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’, a result that would be most clearly manifest in his subsequent metal works. The introduction of metal as a support revolutionised Butcher's creative output and his approach to the act of painting, ‘it may just be a flat piece of metal... But they all have little nicks, edges and imperfections... the result is an accumulation of what I have learnt about that surface’.