Love Letter to a Butterfly is a contemporary photographic work composed of images of flower petals—the source of nectar for butterflies—arranged into a rhythmic pattern of circular forms. The circles also evoke the eyespots, or ocelli, found on butterfly wings. In nature, the circular patterns play a role in deterring predators, creating the illusion of eyes to protect the butterfly.
Fineberg transforms these references into an abstract visual language of iteration. For the work, the petals are heightened with hand-applied diamond dust and sparkles, giving the surface a tactile luminosity.
What initially appears as an orderly geometric composition is a constellation of organic forms. The work is a love letter to the butterfly and to the butterfly in all of us.
Love Letter to a Butterfly, 2026
by Roberta Fineberg
Photography (Pigment Print) on baryta paper
Diamond dust and sparkles, hand-applied by the artist
Edition of 1
Signed, dated, and titled by the artist
Image size: 9.5 × 8in
Ships matted: 14 x 11in
Provenance: RF Studio
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Artist's Bio:
Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a New York-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores serendipity, experimentation, and the evolution of ideas through color, material, and process. Working across photography, drawing, installation, video, and abstraction, she investigates themes of impermanence, play, memory, and transformation. Embracing chance as an essential creative force, her work invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between observation, experience, and the physical world.
Fineberg’s exhibitions include Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery, New York (2025); Gallery128, New York (2025); Collecting: An Art Fair at Westbeth Gallery, New York (2024); Sojourner Gallery, New York (2022); Phyllis Harriman Gallery (2020, 2022); CADAF Online Art Fair (2020); Gallery122, New York (2018); Curate NY (2013); and Photos, Femmes, Féminisme at Paris Photo (2010). Her work is held in public and private collections, including portraits of women writers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In 2022, her photograph Double Helix was featured in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries preview exhibition in New York.
Recent commissions include twenty pigment prints from her Roman God(dess) series for the Orient Express Hotel in Rome (2025). Her work Union, from the Butterfly Series, was selected for Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera (Phaidon, 2025), and in 2026 three works from the series were released as curated digital editions on Sedition.
RF began her career in Paris in the 1980s as an editorial photographer and freelance writer. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including Le Monde, Paris Match, Ms., Jeune Afrique, among others. She is also the author of City Riders: A Story of Riding and Friendship (Howell/Macmillan, 1997).
