BLACK VELVET marks Deborah Buck’s first international solo exhibition, curated by the Jennifer Baahng Gallery. As a collateral program during the 60th Venice Biennale Arte, namely Foreigners Everywhere and Homo Faber 2024: The Journey of Life in Venice, the exhibition features a selected twenty portraitures produced between the 1980s and the present. It depicts vibrant body politics while exploring diverse themes of humor and absurdity prevalent in contemporary art. BLACK VELVET is a landscape of people: the satirical, the sweet, and the strange.

Jennifer Baahng is proud to announce Witches Bridge, Deborah Buck’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Witches Bridge is an arc of Buck’s 40-year career span, showcasing selected works from the 1980s through the present. Coagulating abstraction and surrealism, the exhibition consists of recent paintings that depict intertwined masses that bulge and fold, ignoring illusion, perspective, or scale, flattening the hierarchical relationship between its elements.  In the 90s paintings, Buck portrays a world where familiar-made-into-strange takes on a Domination Symbolique; unconscious cultural and social domination modes occur within the social habits.  Collages, produced in the 2000s and continuing, are fragmented visuals of conjectures to be fathomed—ranging from the alchemical to the astrological and the heretical to the folklore. Witches Bridge delivers rich narratives in invented landscapes and allegorical scenes, where an absurd tale is configured to provoke profound inquiry and savoring of life.

The exhibition opens on May 16, Thursday, with a reception from 6 – 8 pm.