Circle #1 #2
Circle #1, 2023 /porcelain, 85 x 85 cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Circle #1 #2, 2023 / installing, gallery Bradwolff & Partners
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Circle #2, 2023 /porcelain, 85 x 85 cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Circle #1 #2, 2023 / installing, gallery Bradwolff & Partners
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Project Circle #1 #2, porcelain, 2023, exhibition‘Together’, Bradwolf & Partners gallery, Amsterdam, NL / image #1 credits: Gert Jan van Rooij
The project ‘how materials become concepts’ (2023)/ residency EKWC (European Ceramic Work Center) supported by: stichting niemeijer fonds, stichting stokroos (hanzenfonds of the prins bernhard cultuurfonds), amsterdam fonds voor de kunst (afk), amarte fonds, european ceramic work center, Bradwolff Projects Amsterdam, Stirna Interior, NL
Nanne op ’t Ende, text comissed by EKWC 2023
Ruta Butkute
Ceramics isn’t as unpredictable as people tend to think. Systematic testing, careful measurements, detailed records and technical expertise can go a long way to obtain consistent results. But not all artists are after consistency. During her EKWC residency, Ruta Butkute refused to be contained by rules, trusting her instinct instead to test the material to its limits. She poured liquid porcelain of various colours onto circular and rectangle slabs to create a smooth, marbled plane of frozen movement. Given the limited time casting slip remains fluid, Butkute had to work really fast in frantic dialogue with the porcelain, constantly responding to it in a physical, performative process. It resulted in a series of fragments from a larger universe, cold yet full of life, where each work is still a world in itself. Occasional cracks reveal tensions and imperfections, casually hinting at some unknown dimension beyond the impenetrable surface
porcelain slip (pouring), 2023 / EKWC (European Ceramic Work Center)
colored porcelain slip (pouring), 2023 / EKWC
porcelain slip painting, 2023 / EKWC
New Work (2023)
Ruta Butkute
written by Àngels Miralda / edited by Jenny Wilson
Arms reach up and forwards, forming a circle, expanding the body and encapsulating a void. This spherical shape contains all, traversing time backwards and forwards into the infinite. Movement loops within the thresholds of architecture and its relation to the human scale. As the potter’s wheel spins outwards, the hand moves closer, throwing down clay. The clay is reminiscent of a body, malleable, soft and transformed, spinning on a circular platform. Warped and rounded, smoothed and thinned, spinning into a delicate thing, thrown and caressed on a platform – ever spinning outwards.
In Ruta Butkute’s practice, sculpture is situated within a spatial realm shared by time, gesture and bodies in motion. Objects expand beyond modern concepts of autonomy, entering a field of related networks of agency that create and aid temporal choreographies. If modernism was defined by the object in itself – autonomous, separate and outside of this contextual world – the contemporary object is in effect embedded in a flux of time, constantly passing. In this way, Butkute’s process involves sculpture as performance, performance as object, and space as a symbolic constellation that relates to our movement through the world.
In Heidegger’s famous metaphysical essay “The Thing”, an object can be understood only in relation to its use.1 His famous example is that of a vase: defined not by the material that forms the vase but by the negative space that allows the material to enact the verb of containing. Spatiality is thus already built into the definition of the vase and so is the “nearness” of ourselves to this object. Only the vase – which is of a certain proportion in relation to the body and which can be held and can contain matter – is considered an object worthy of such definition.
When it comes to the concept of Dasein in relation to objects as equipment, Heidegger looks to the hammer. This tool is defined as “ready-to-hand” because its shape is adapted to the human hand. It is named and exists as an extension of the hand and its reason-for-being relates to the anthropos.2 The hammer comprises various material components, but what makes it “ready-to-hand” is the ability to use it to further our own constructions. The tool as an extension of the hand is not unidirectional: although we control what the tool is used for, it also dictates the shape and form of our hand during its use.
The body is a mental measure of the world, or so it seemed for quite a while. If the previous decades have explored the possibility of time without humanity in books such as Time without Becoming by Quentin Meillasoux3 or in the agency of objects still within human networks of correlation according to Graham Harman4, Speculative Realism has circled back to Kant’s sublime in Timothy Morton’s development of the concept into the Hyperobject.5 Within these recent experiments into pure materiality and time without limits, the centrality of the body within human thought makes for a stark appearance. The idea of “correlationism”, a term coined by Meillasoux, lies within Butkute’s work which posits the sculpture as an intermediary – one that does
not exist without a network nor without motion. Rather than attempting to de-anthroposize the world, Butkute’s work acknowledges and embellishes our relation to the world through material and spatial experiments – relating the body to all of our surroundings.
Performing the Object
In the performance Collide (2023), made in collaboration with performer Yurie Umamoto, a mobile sculptural element occupies the floor of a large exhibition space. It appears as an obstacle at first. But when the performer’s mediated motions shift the wheels of this ‘obstacle’, it expands and contracts, and becomes a partner in a coordinated dance led by human gestures. This expanding and contracting network of lines connects a series of wheeled discs that are adapted to occupy an expansive space.
Previous performances have broached the topic of circularity and centripetal force through architectural form. In Two Bowlines (under a strain) (2015) a performer is placed on top of a large wooden circle that spins around and reacts to the motions of a dancer’s body. Standing, lying down, folding with the motion, the dancer lies on top of this enlarged potter’s wheel – a rotating disc onto which the body is continuously thrown and reformed. The connection between the body and the world of matter beyond it is flung into a network of relation in which one cannot exist without the other.
Spatial and Performative Gestures
Drawing from established sculptural techniques and ceramic traditions of porcelain, Butkute has continuously explored the spatiality of the object and our human relation to this equation. While these objects have generally been positioned in the space to create choreographies, her latest series turns this around to focus on the performativity of the maker. Using methods that create analogies to traditional processes of production, Butkute does not include but implies the body – the work results in a material archive of motion, contained within the invisible folds that dwell beneath the surface. (In previous works such as Tumble #3 (2021), the object has also been displayed as an archive.)
The porcelain pieces’ geological layers reveal this process, offering the viewer a glimpse into the multiple throws that have produced the pigmented flat surface of these works. A minimal but impactful piece of layered dark clay serves as a grammatical caesura in the gallery space. By firing the clay at too high a temperature, it begins to melt and darken. With a ragged edge reminiscent of broken coal, the work sits between the organic and inorganic, its materiality no longer discernible. When positioned on the wall, the work connects language and gesture in a grammatical uplifting, like a conductor’s baton, to signal a sigh or a pause in their material finality.
1. Martin Heidegger, 1949. “The Thing,” In Bremen Lectures, (https://www.beyng.com/pages/en/BremenLectures/TheThing.html)
2. Eternalised, 2021. “Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand”, (https://eternalisedofficial.com/2021/02/02/ready-to-hand-and-present-at-hand-heidegger/)
3. Quentin Meillasoux, 2008. Time Without Becoming, Middlesex University, (https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.pdf)
4. Tsaiyi Wu, 2020. “A Dream of a Stone: The Ethics of De-Anthropocentrism”, De Gruyter, Open Philosophy. 5. Ecology Without Nature, 2011. “A Speculative Sublime” (https://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/03/speculative-sublime.html
Bound
Bound #2, 2023 / porcelain, aliuminium, plexiglass
87h x 200w x 15d cm
Bound #2, 2023 / porcelain, aliuminium, plexiglass
87h x 200w x 15d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aliuminium, plexiglass, tv screen
250h x 250w x 25d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aliuminium, plexiglass, tv screen
250h x 250w x 25d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aliuminium, plexiglass, tv screen (video states & drives)
250h x 250w x 25d cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Bound #3, 2023 / porcelain,
50 x 50 cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
duo exhibition ‘the alchemy of abstaction’
left: ruta butkute/
right: akmar
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Bound #1 square, 2023 / porcelain,
51 x 51.5 cm
Bound #1, 2023 / porcelain, aluminium, plexi glass drawing, tv screen (video ‘states & drives)
350h 210w x 20d cm
Bound, installation/ 2023, mixed medium: porcelain, aluminium shelves, aluminium, plexi glass sheets, tv screen (video ‘states & drives’). Exhibitions (2023): The Alchemy of Abstraction, duo exhibition (akmar & ruta Butkute), Bradwolff Projects Amsterdam / Bound, installation, Movement Exposed gallery, Utrecht / Turbulentie, Omstand Arnhem, NL / Wanderland, Amarte Fonds, Krakeling, Amsterdam (2024)
Ruta Butkute’s sculptural choreographic research forms at once the basis and connection between the various media she works with: sculpture, video, ceramics and performance. She currently experiments with porcelain as a medium for painting. Several recent works were created during a residency at EKWC (European Ceramic Work Centre) in Oisterwijk. With the exhibition Bound Ruta Butkute is presenting a range of porcelain paintings, multi media installation and performance videos. The exhibition is realised in collaboration with Bradwolff & Partners. https://me-galleryspace.com/bound-ruta-butkute-3/
The project ‘how materials become concepts’ (2023) supported by: Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting Stokroos (hanzenfonds of the prins bernhard cultuurfonds), Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK), Amarte Fonds, Bradwolff Projects Amsterdam, Omstand Arnhem, Movement Exposed Utrecht and Stirna Interior.
photo credits: LNDWstudio (Bound installation), Ruta Butkute (exhibition opening)
the alchemy of abstraction / duo exhibition (akmar & ruta Butkute), 2023, Bradwolff Projects Amsterdam
The works of Ruta Butkute and akmar come together in the duo exhibition ‘The Alchemy of Abstraction’ This meeting showcases two artists who each in their own way explore the boundaries of artistic expression, in different disciplines and with different materials. Ruta Butkute is known for her sculptural choreographic research and has embarked on a project exploring porcelain as a medium for painting. These monumental “paintings,” combined with a multimedia installation titled “Bound,” push the boundaries of artistic expression. She meticulously experiments with porcelain and within it the possibilities of movement, transformation, fracture, melting, shrinkage, expansion and solidity. By distinguishing between accidental events and intentional results, Butkute aims to perceive the creation of materiality in a new way. By setting the material in motion and guiding its transformation into new forms, Butkute’s body becomes like an imprint on the clay, reflecting every action of her hands. Butkute sees the creation of sculpture as a process that emerges from bodily actions in spaces, as well as from architectural relationships that inspire movement and sculpture.
akmar is, a multidisciplinary artist who delves into various forms of art, from computer generated videos to physical sculptures. akmar questions the ambiguïty of reality. She explores diverse manifestations of matter and seeks to uncover the essence of pure self-expression.akmar continuously challenges herself by embracing unfamiliar materials and deconstructing objects to see them in a new light. The artist finds beauty in dysfunctionality and appreciates items that have lost their defined role due to age fashion or other factors. By selecting outdated software, remaining materials, and personal artifacts from her history, such as generations- worn fur coats or drawings from childhood to present, akmar repurposes these elements in new works. Her art embraces the concept that everything is in a constant state of change and transformation, without imposing political or activist judgments. Instead, she allows the materials to speak for themselves, creating a space for them to express their inherent qualities.
‘The Alchemy of Abstraction’ brings together the works of Butkute and akmar in an exhibition that focuses on abstraction, the transformation of matter, and the exploration of reality. The synergy between these two artists creates a unique dynamic and invites the audience on a journey of discovery and wonder.
art rotterdam opening / installation ‘bound interpretation’ bradwolff & partners gallery, 2024
Collide #5, porcelain, 50 cm, 2023
Collide #6, porcelain, 46 cm / review gallery viewer 2024
Collide #6, porcelain, 46 cm / review gallery viewer 2024
The installation Bound, Art Rotterdam 2024, gallery Bradwolff & Partners, NL
Artworks: left top: Circle #2, porcelain, 85 cm, 2023 / below: Bound #7 circle, 50 cm, 2023 /middle top: Collide #6, porcelain, 46 cm/ middle lower: Collide #5, porcelain, 50 cm/ right lower: Bound #1 circle small, 47 cm
Review: https://galleryviewer.com/en/article/2227/ruta-butkute-sculptural-movement