Delicate and Strong
at the Same Time.

Käthe Butcher was born in Leipzig in 1990 and returned there in 2020, after several years in Berlin and London. She studied Fashion Design in Berlin, then took an MA in Illustration at Camberwell, University of the Arts London.

She works primarily in graphite — pencils from 2H to 8B — with fineliners and markers, building images from bold, deliberate line and a restrained palette where colour arrives only where it is needed. Recent work threads in patterns drawn from historical ornament and botanical photography. Hand-lettered fragments of text often sit inside the drawings, functioning less as captions than as the figure’s own interior voice.

“It has always been about feelings, love and how to deal with intimacy — and chasing after intimate moments and special connections.”

Her influences are Art Nouveau and Egon Schiele, and — by her own account — manga, which she came to as a teenager after a childhood of Disney and Western comics, and which shaped her taste for delicate linework.

Her subject has been consistent since the beginning: intimacy, and the difficulty of it. The work is widely recognised within the LGBTQ+ community for its depiction of erotic and emotional relationships between women. She exhibited in QUEER FRONTIER(S) in Soho, London, with proceeds to the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre, and her illustration has appeared on book covers for Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.