Spoke Art's NSFW is a group show that does what its title says and takes it seriously: an annual survey of work that handles sex and the body directly, hung in a commercial gallery in San Francisco rather than filed away as something to be discreet about. Käthe Butcher showed in the 2021 edition. The original of Aftermath — graphite and watercolour, nine inches square — sold out of it.
Nine inches square
The scale is worth sitting with. Nine inches is small — smaller than a sheet of A4, a drawing you would have to walk up to and stand close in front of. In a group show full of work competing for a room, that is a decision to make the viewer come to you and be alone with it for a moment.
It also suits the subject. These are pictures about private moments. Blown up to wall scale they would become declarations, which is a different genre. At nine inches the drawing stays the size of something you might find rather than something you are being shown.
Graphite and watercolour
Most of the work is graphite with very little else. Aftermath adds watercolour, and the restraint is the same as everywhere in her practice: colour arrives only where it is needed, and its scarcity is what gives it force. In a drawing that is otherwise grey, one washed passage does the work of a spotlight.
Why this show, and not others
Her work is widely recognised within the LGBTQ+ community for how it treats erotic and emotional relationships between women — not as a subject to be handled carefully, but as the ordinary material of a life. She has also exhibited in QUEER FRONTIER(S) in Soho, London, with proceeds going to the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre.
That is the exhibition record we can stand behind. It is shorter than the one this site used to carry, which listed solo shows and international group exhibitions that no source supports. A short true list is worth more than a long invented one, and it is the only kind worth putting in front of a reader.
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