NEW YORK, NY.- Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is presenting a show of new oil paintings by Benjamin Butler titled Water Paintings. The show runs through December 6, 2025.
Each of Benjamin Butler’s Water Paintings is a square-format canvas structured around a series of wave motifs. Painted in shades of blue, turquoise, and violet, these measured iterations of waveforms carry a musical quality, as variations in tone and density build into a visual rhythm. The arcs and layered horizontal brushtrokes evoke the surface of water without literal depiction, creating an optical sense of movement that is both systematic and atmospheric.
For more than two decades, Butler has pursued natural forms as sites of painterly investigation, whether through vertical forests, isolated trees, mountain landscapes, or the geometric structures of pinecones. Consistency lies in his engagement with nature as subject and his straightforward handling of painting’s histories. Variety arises from the shifting processes and strategies he applies. With Water Paintings, Butler extends this trajectory, turning the motif of water into a meditation on recurrence, perception, and abstraction.
Though structured around a characterization of water, the works are not depictions of place. Created without reference material, they evoke a memory of water rather than its image, generating an atmosphere that is both universal and elusive. Butler’s economical vocabulary asks what it means to “paint water” when painting itself is less about representation than about repetition, duration, and process. By deliberately avoiding titles like seascapes or ocean paintings, he keeps the specificity open, presenting water in its most elemental form.
Benjamin Butler (b.1975, Westmoreland, Kansas) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2000) and his BFA from Emporia State University, Kansas (1997). His work has been exhibited internationally, and is represented in institutional collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas and the Glenbow Collection, Calgary, Canada. Recent exhibitions include Water Paintings (Lakeside) at Galerie Petra Seiser, Attersee, Austria and Painting, as It Were (Painting as Is III), curated by Heidi Hahn & Tim Wilson at Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany. Butler is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York and Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo.
