Bev Butkow, South Africa

Bev Butkow is a South African artist whose practice engages a hybrid, fluid, trans-disciplinary approach to making amorphous woven-painted-sculptural-narrative-embodied-entanglements to consider labour as a gendered experience and the tensions of socially-encoded expectations on women.

Since her solo exhibition titled m/other in 2015, she has exhibited at numerous group exhibitions and art fairs. Recent exhibitions include The Art of Lithography, Wits Art Museum (2018) and Joburg Art Fair (2018), with 1-54 London to follow in October 2019. Joburg Art Fair 2018 voted Butkow one of “Africa’s top 20 new and exciting talents”.  Butkow’s work is housed in local and international collections.

She completed her Honours in Art History in 2017 cum laude following a 30-year gap from studying and in 2019 worked towards her Master of Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg under a scholarship from the Andrew W Mellon: Governing Intimacies project. 

Committed to social engagement and education, Butkow co-founded a rural library and takes an active role on the board of 11 Johannesburg schools. She works from the Bag Factory Artist Studios, the legacy South African art institution. She was born and lives in Johannesburg with her husband and four children.