“Deborah Buck’s energy is preternatural and her generosity of spirit seems to flow from the same deep well. We met at a wedding several years ago, and I learned that her path to becoming a full-time artist was not the usual one, largely because her creative drive was broad, democratic, and highly entrepreneurial.”

Deborah Buck’s first solo exhibition at JENNIFER BAAHNG, Deborah Buck: Witches Bridge, on the Upper East Side, is curated as a small survey spanning her forty-year career. Buck’s earlier work is a fresh discovery and confirms that she has been an astute observer of painting culture and a lover of paint from the beginning. The works are populated with sensually painted, strange, centralized forms that recall the lineage of neo-expressionist paintings from the late 1970s to the 1980s. “Bridge” is an appropriate word to ponder upon Buck’s work, as the relationship between past and present and her chosen themes are apparent in this exhibition. One anticipates the continuation of bold evolutions in years to come. Between oil and water, paper and panel, and a woman’s power in society, we observe how the metaphysical nature of Buck’s early work translates into critiques and satirical undertakings of the discomforts felt today. Buck imagines narratives that probe; these invented worlds would’ve never been known without her meandering brush. The freedom in her recent exploration of abstraction is most felt as a hard-won stability instilled with exaltation.

“The Church’s summer 2024 exhibition considers humor and contemporary art, focusing solely on the work of female-identifying artists. Conceived and organized by Chief Curator Sara Cochran, it features the work of 40 artists across all media installed across The Church’s Main Floor and the Mezzanine…The goals are two-fold. The first is to counter the tired stereotypes and clichés about women not being funny or able to take a joke. The second is to illustrate the different forms and topics of humor in contemporary art, from artistic jokes, political outrages, bodily functions and appearances, cultural stereotypes, and sex and death to the absurd and surreal, puns and slapstick, as well as poking fun at sacred cows of art and its institutions…This exhibition gathers works that are satirical, serious, sweet, self-deprecating, ironic, mocking, strange, surreal, angry, subversive, and even gross. It takes art off its pedestal and puts the viewer in a position to laugh or shake their head.” 

The Rains are Changing Fast highlights artwork recently acquired by The Heckscher Museum of Art alongside a selection of key works long held in the Museum’s collection. For over a century, the Heckscher has been collecting and presenting art that explores the landscapes and social issues of its place and time. This exhibition, which takes its title from a 2021 video by Christine Sciulli, features new and beloved works of art that reveal the diverse ways artists contend with environmental and cultural change. Created over 175 years by 39 artists, the works are united by shared engagements with landscape, allegory, and abstraction. Some, like Richard Mayhew’s Pescadero (2014) or George Inness’s The Pasture, Durham, Connecticut (c. 1879), present luminous, if precarious, visions of the American landscape. Others, including Deborah Buck’s They Had Stars in Their Eyes (2020) and Dorothy Dehner’s Landscape (1976), employ modes of abstraction that speak to issues of gender and materiality. The resulting visual conversations emphasize the Museum’s ongoing commitment to social concerns, environmental issues, and Long Island’s diverse communities.

Deborah Buck’s Into the Wild: To Crash is Divine, curated so thoughtfully by Jennifer Baahng at La Mama Galleria, connects the thinking-through process of drawing to the loose shaping of crowds and identity. Buck’s work breaks down the boundaries between modes of cartooning and abstraction to operate as covert satire. Between her figurescapes and phase shifts of pastiche, Buck generates erased zones of gray that she then utilizes as an important formal resource. By revealing the trace and shadow of her expressive hand, she makes the evidence of her thinking and the provisional sense of community her subject, allowing the shadows and index of drawing to form productive tension with flat color.

“I don’t want to be a windup girl,” Deborah Buck told me in her studio, pointing to a female creature with a crank sticking out of her back in the left-hand corner of a recent painting. Buck graciously walked me through the body of work heading to her solo show at La MaMa Galleria, a nonprofit gallery and an extension of the experimental theater club of the same name founded in 1961 by Ellen Stewart in New York City’s East Village. These are some of Buck’s most extensive works to date, and this is the first time she has gone beyond the two-dimensional format. She refers to them as murals, which she creates by dissecting elements from previous works and collaging them to produce layered scenes populated by hybrid figures occupying the panoramic drama of history painting. These creatures wear pearls around their necks; they chomp monster-like teeth that mimic the same string of ivory beads; their painted bodies drip down the paper’s surface. The context of La MaMa Galleria is fitting with its affiliation to the theater, as Buck speaks of these beings as a cast of characters.  —Tanya Merrill