Deborah Butterfield's work

I am impressed by Deborah Butterfield's work: a horse made of bronze branches. What I am admiring her work is that she managed to create a form depending on her personal feeling. I was also shocked by the sculpture material which appears to be real branches but is made of bronze. At the first glance, it looks like a horse painted by Beihong Xu, a famous Chinese painter. The character of the Chinese traditional painting is to express the spirit of the artist by the Chinese writing brushes. I feel that those bronze branches are just like the strokes which represent the artist inspirational moods. When I looked at this piece closer, branches are connected very well to form inner and outer space in a horse in an abstract manner. The hollow space between branche brings us a lot of imagination. In Chinese painting, the virtual and the real are most important expression techniques. In this horse sculpture, the artist took advantaged of the negative and the positive space in the strutures so that the whole form shows grace and ligtness. To some extend, Deborah was exploring the material expression and the relationship between inside and outside. She digged out the unique character of the material which embodied the artist's mood and interest.