DEBORAH BUCK

Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail
La MaMa New York
Deborah Buck
INTO THE WILD: To Crash is Divine
Sept 28 – Oct 27, 2023
 
La MaMa Galleria
Guest curated by Jennifer Baahng
 

INTO THE WILD:  To Crash Is Divine

Into The Wild presents the pathbreaking, allegorical works of protean painter and ardent colorist Deborah Buck.  It is a focused solo exhibition showcasing nearly two dozen recent works. An exploration into contemporary concerns, the works are incarnations of Buck’s inquiries on social attitudes, culture and blasphemy, and emotional freedom at once personal and universal.  Elegant and polemical, the art included in Into The Wild attests to Deborah Buck’s arrival at a distinctive narrative filled with fantastically Fauvistic personas and cautionary tales.  Colliding secular with the sacred, the exhibition hints at essential codes that unravel the icons and slogans of our time; protest and provoke.  Into The Wild invites a raw and fresh conversation with playful aesthetics, humor, and imprudence.  It is a baroque fantasy fortress that upholds active pursuit and the joy of queueing.

Born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, Deborah Buck grew up on a farm. Her home provided a fertile environment for creative exploration, which led to the distinctively unique, sculpted, archetypical visual motifs later in her art.  In 1975, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where, at age 18, she was mentored by Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, who told her: “Nobody can teach you to paint – you already know how. But to be taken seriously, you should learn everything about the world around you – religion, politics, design, science.”  She moved to New York City in 1990 and joined the wave of female artists who gained prominence in New York in the 90s.

ABSURDITY

Into The Wild is Deborah Buck’s response to the absurdity of life.  At the exhibition, first up is an elongated convex wall dedicated to a bizarre, vibrant scene of solo works painted with exuberant colors on 300-pound, hot-pressed Arches paper. The works, each measuring 45 x 55 inches, bear joy, nostalgia, anger, frustration, and love.  They are the ethos of the artist’s thinking and grounding moments: “Bite-Sized,” the virtuoso vision of war; “The Judge,” a sense of primal justice; wacky “House Plants”; “Deep Space Hedges,” the Hamptons; “Coffee (Talk) Clutch;” and “Mr. Nervous,” a possible self-portrait.

THE WILDS AND THE LAURELED 

Deeper into the exhibition is a forest of wilds; “Throw Me A Bone,” “Pig Never Wins,” and “Royal Flush.”  A march of sexy retro magenta and Barbie pink therianthropes who conjure melancholy and compassion.  The tall feature wall unveils three portraits on wood, embellished with period frames; a laureled threesome: “Widow’s Peak,” “I’m No Angel,” and “Dark Roots.”  As part of Buck’s new and ongoing series of portraits of contemporaries, these harken back to the inventor of Cubism, Pablo Picasso’s perspective on abstraction and deconstruction.  Both artists paint their thoughts rather than what they see.

CRASH IS DIVINE

The apotheosis of the exhibition is Deborah Buck’s eclectic tour-de-force murals: “Heavy is the Head” and “The Eyes Have It.”  Striking and enormous, the two murals, which mirror each other and occupy the vast main gallery, are cinematic spectacles depicting nuanced performers, unleashed, intense, and intimate.  They contain shifting facades, overlapping planes, and fragmented, condensed flat surfaces that snap into surprisingly coherent compositions, a conference of pictorial intelligence.  A visual constant in the murals is the strands of pearls, which signify the currency and the agency women hold.   

“Heavy Is the Head” is a commemorative majesty that commands the first wall in the main gallery, comprised of a half dozen of the artist’s solo works cut and collaged.  At about 5 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it is a Surrealist dreamscape of a free-flowing connection to wisdom and knowledge passed down generations of women saints and personages: After Botticelli, Queen Elizabeth I, Empress Dowager Cixi, Venus of Willendorf, Cleopatra, a Bedouin woman, a futuristic female robot, and the artist herself.

“The Eyes Have It” is a multifaceted phosphorous display that commands the second wall.  Also, at about 5 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it contains fragmented visuals that insist on conjecture to be fathomed.  The symbols range from the alchemical to the astrological and the heretical to the folklore.  Grand and engrossing in its spatial genres, the mural is born from the artist’s dozen solo works that were chopped and coalesced back – “The Mechanical Girl and Her Mechanical Dog,” “Easter Bunny Bandit,” “In the Land of Peacock Trees,” “Proud Parents,” and “Enchanted Forest” – and dares us to see the complexity of the objects and ideas in the work.  Notable is the extravagant staging and devising within the flat, two-dimensional work.  Reminiscent of Japanese manga and anime that uses flat planes of color to emphasize the surface, à la Superflat by Takashi Murakami, the mural reinforces Deborah Buck’s commentary on culture with little distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low.’

INFECTIOUS GLEE AND RENEGADE

Into The Wild is a wild west, where convention and fiat are unchained and released, and the world’s traditional satire and viral lampooning are surpassed.  Alluding to Hieronymus Bosh’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the exhibition is a three-wall-triptych of drawings and murals of fantastical figures and anthropomorphic forms, and portraitures, living on Abstract Expressionistic dripping and scuffed-up grounds.  Combining abstraction and surrealism, Deborah Buck creates rich narratives and invented creatures that quiver with life amongst dreamlike landscapes and allegorical scenes imbued with meaning and emotion.  Through her masterful employment of sumi ink and skilled craftsmanship, she advocates the value of discourse on femininity and identity.  The exhibition is a glimpse into the elusive conquest of making the world to our liking.  Into The Wild is a clever farce that joyously upends normality and delivers infectious glee.  And Deborah Buck relishes being a renegade

Dr. Jennifer Baahng, Guest Curator

RELATED:

Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

Categories: exhibitions

Tags:

DEBORAH BUCK

Deborah Buck

DEBORAH BUCK

Lives and works in New York

EDUCATION

1978

B.A. Studio Art, Trinity College, Hartford, Ct.

1975

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2023   

La MaMa Gallery, NY

Picasso, Welcome to America, Jennifer Baahng Gallery, NY

2022  

Transforming the Figure, South Hamptons Arts Center, NY

Future Perfect/Imperfect, Silverman Galleries, New Canaan, CT

2021   

Five Points Center for The Visual Arts, Torrington, CT

Nobody Like This Body, Marquee Projects, NY

East End Collected 6 Art Center, Southampton , NY

2020  

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT;

Heckscher Museum, Long Island, NY

2019 

Deborah Buck and RichPaint and Steelard Heinrich, ILLE Arts Gallery, Amagansett, NY

2018 

Deborah Buck and Tribal Art of New Guinea, North of History Gallery, NY

Ink, Widener GalleryAustin Art Center at Trinity College, Hartford, CT

2017 

Out of the Box,  Deborah Buck and John Monti. ILLE Arts Gallery, Amagansett, NY

2012  

What’s Inside, Julie Saul Gallery, NY

2012

Deborah Buck: Retrospective, Art Center, Garrison, NY

SELECTED GRANTS AND AWARDS

2022 

Light and Shadow, Maryland Federation of Art, 2022

2020 

N’Or Easter, New Britain Museum of Art

2017 

Artist in the Marketplace Alumnus Award, Bronx Museum

COLLECTIONS

The Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York

The Parrish Museum in Water Mill, New York

The Bunker at Beth Rudin DeWoody in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Related

Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023

Categories: artists

Tags:

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

Madison Ave New York

Picasso, Welcome to America

June 15 – September 27, 2023

R.C. Baker

Brandon Ballengée

Romare Bearden

Deborah Buck

Shijia Chen

Billy Copley

Eileen Foti

Björn Meyer-Ebrecht

Jaye Moon

Pablo Picasso

André Raffray

Janet Taylor Pickett

Zhang Hongtu

Every artist since the early 20th century has been influenced by Pablo Picasso.  The protean painter/ sculptor/ printmaker/ ceramicist helped define what “modern” art once was – and is still becoming.  In 1939, MoMA’s staff was gathering 300 works by the world’s “most famous living artist” (according to the museum’s press release) for Picasso: Forty Years of His Art.  A centerpiece of the exhibit was Guernica, his grisaille mural decrying the destruction of the small Basque town by Nazi bombers, in 1937.

Along with Michelangelo and Rembrandt, the name Picasso (1881-1973) has become a synonym – a cliché, even – for “artist.”  But none of the artists in Picasso, Welcome to America see the Spanish-born titan as an old hat.  Instead, these ten Americans find in the European trailblazer constant inspiration and ongoing challenge.  Zhang Hongtu imagines Chairman Mao exposed by glaring illumination similar to the all-seeing lantern in Guernica.  Jaye Moon also reimagines Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, in When Bob Dylan Meets Picasso, Guernica – using Lego bricks in Braille rather than paint.

The bodies and masks in another Picasso touchstone, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), come under scrutiny from Eileen Foti and André Raffray through substitution and homage.  Billy Copley finds masks in unlikely surroundings, while Janet Taylor Pickett moves effigies aside to place her powerful female figure at center stage.  Deborah Buck turns Picasso’s infamously harsh male gaze around, painting surreal figures that might be asking, “Who’s crying now?”  In Weary of Treading the Earth, from 1945, Romare Bearden, working in watercolor and ink rather than his later signature collage, energizes cubist space with a circus-like palette.  R.C. Baker riffs beyond Picasso’s Blue and Rose periods through primary-colored aluminum printing plates.  Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s dynamic wood and enamel sculpture strips the figure to cubist angles and voids, while Brandon Ballengée searches for animals that, like Picasso’s minotaurs, are no longer with us. Original works by Pablo Picasso will also be on view, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death.

All of the artists in this exhibition have been influenced by Picasso’s experiments with form and perspective – his breaking of traditional and academic rules.  Some of the work here also comments on his darker side, while other pieces engage with the social and political aspects of Picasso’s art.  Ultimately, these ten contemporary artists in Picasso, Welcome to America appreciate the formal and aesthetic complexity of a constant innovator.  This great artist was effectively barred from ever visiting the United States because he was a member of the French Communist Party.  But the joke was on the Feds – Picasso has been in America all along.

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Deborah Buck Heavy Is The Head, 2023 Acrylic, sumi ink on Archers paper 55 x 156 in. Detail

DEBORAH BUCK

INTO THE WILD: To Crash Is Divine
Sept 28 - Oct 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

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June 15 – Sept 27, 2023
Madison Ave New York Picasso, Welcome to America June 15 – July 31, 2023

PICASSO, WELCOME TO AMERICA

June 15 – Sept 27, 2023