Artwork information

Richard Maloy has practised a kind of faux portraiture. His body is usually centrally positioned, while his image is hidden or only partly visible. This series of butter paintings was originally accompanied by a performance for camera, in which Maloy sculpted butter from a mass equal to his own body weight. The highly evocative material, with its

well-known odour and texture, creates a brilliant artificial colour field for Maloy’s picture plane. In the butter paintings, the finger marks and trawl lines of Maloy’s hands imprint his body in the work.