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 lover of paint from the beginning. The works are populated with sensually painted, strange, centralized forms recalling the lineage of neo-expressionist paintings stemming from the late 1970s onto the 1980s. These will be familiar to those who visited Buck’s previous exhibition, Into the Wild: To Crash is Divine, which was beaming with her well-known theatrical figures.

The three works in the back gallery, installed as a triptych, Badge of Courage (1991), Tassel (1992), Nest Egg (1992) share a similar treatment of thin layers of paint with turpentine in the background, generating their own temperature, while melding metallic bronze with pinks and ochres, on which zeppelin-like forms, artichokes, and pinecone shapes, morphing one into the next. We don’t quite know where these shapes come from, and their unlikely textural combinations suggest an inflection of non-conformity in spirit and sense of humor. The materiality of the gestures and the solitary presence of these totemic, centralized, bulbous forms, exudes a strong personality, yet the humor they carry is subtle and perhaps still innocent. The expressionistic language bears a kinship to portraits by George Condo from the 1990s. We relish in the material qualities that range from fur, rope, velour, organic matter, and plastic structures and together make these imagined objects float.

We see a massive change in Buck’s work from this year, a selection of which hangs at the entrance and first room of the exhibition. The artist has shifted from canvas to panel, which carries a heightened focus on architecture, geometry, and abstraction; the figure is no longer present, and we are left to enter through mysterious shapes, forms, and motifs evoking themes that may empower, question, and perhaps submerge through the multiple layers of female configurations representing identity and place in society. In fact, Buck’s artistic practice is inseparable from her activism. She is a staunch supporter of women’s rights.

One of the most identifiable attributes in Buck’s recent work is her affinity for black contour lines, which may be read as the pictorial anchor. It was through travels in China that she came upon the sensuality and gestural qualities of Chinese calligraphy and sumi ink. The black lines, that can be read as painterly drawing of the contours of shapes and motifs, are due to this practice of ink and brush. Her line is full of humor and satire, and we can see that Buck’s paintings grow and change as this line builds fantastical structures that could exist in fairy tales, games, or carnivals as Chutes and Ladders (2024) suggests. This painting could be a map of urban plumbing, arteries in the body, or an array of pipes in a factory, the likes of which might exist in Willy Wonka’s world. Candy Man (2024) evokes themes of balloons, sweets, and colorful lollipops, yet the black lines are a warning. At times there are cobwebs, perhaps suggesting the joy of this fantasy has an eerie past. A Fair Hearing (2024) is the closest to a figure that we can relate to her past works and refers most directly to the title of the show, where the latter word, witch, plays into our understanding of female archetypes as healers or outcasts to be feared. The crisscross of lines coming out of the creature’s orifice imply that narratives, sounds, words, can often be abstracted or twisted. The black lines also hint at a fishing net in Call To Reason (2024) or breasts in multiples in Witches Bridge.

We sense that Buck, through her extensive travels in the world, her participation in supporting women in the arts, has formulated an archeological approach to painting, where forms are found through process and automatism, uncovered and recovered layer by layer. We can see the manifestation of her thoughts through that black contour, which animates the surface. In her earlier paintings we see Buck combining different textures as she builds imagined vertical structures. Incidentally, we can also notice that this desire to combine and construct textural differences is still present in her recent work. Indigenous Whispers (2024), for instance, has similar vertical structures. Here they are built of a tree trunk with wooden grain below a smooth, fleshy pink chunk, which comes from a different world entirely; the whole is set against an electrified red background and yellow thunderbolts, bearing structural semblances to that triptych in the back gallery.

“Bridge” is an appropriate word to ponder upon Buck’s work, as the relationship between past and present and her chosen themes are made 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, and these invented worlds would’ve never been known without her meandering brush. The freedom appears in her recent exploration in abstraction is most felt as a hard-won stability, instilled with exaltation.

Contributor