Bev Butkow (b. Johannesburg, 1967) is a South African artist whose work transgresses the boundaries between textile art, painting, sculpture, and installation. She works experimentally across and between these genres, using weaving as a literal and figurative process that connects the material, the personal and the social.
Butkow is a latecomer to art-making, having transitioned from a successful career in finance to a full-time art practice. In 2022 she completed her Master of Fine Arts (cum laude) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits), with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and presented the outcomes of this academic engagement as a solo body of work at the Origins Centre Museum at Wits University.
Through processes of making and unmaking, weaving and unravelling, her works dramatize her own experience of occupying different and sometimes conflicting roles simultaneously, but each of them gendered. Her materially and conceptually rigorous approach to art-making is a means of interrogating the ways in which we walk upon the earth, alone and in community.
