Barbara Buckman, “New Work,” May 22 – June 26, 2015

Exhibit Catalog, Barbara Buckman, New Work

Barbara Buckman works with traditional drawing and painting media, provoking and engaging the viewer’s imagination while developing compositions that playfully question plausibility and logic. She develops her images by manipulating painterly elements and variables, constantly adding and subtracting, weighing and balancing, inventing and representing. According to the artist, “(she) uses stable geometric shapes and arranges them in animated dialogue with invented imagery and automatic drawing.”

The imagery references drafting, cartography and mechanical reproduction moving the viewer’s attention around and through the composition with letters, shapes, dots, and dashes. Her forms also suggest playful production. Lego bricks, building blocks, and train tracks float among fanciful mechanical components. There is also a sense of weightlessness to her arrangement, as elements rise and fall above a far-off landscape. Gestural marks add energy, activating the composition where she alternates pristine graphic elements against richly layered surfaces. Together, these elements juxtapose a sense of simultaneous stability and risk with a strong sense of rhythm and movement. The small scale of these new works draws the viewer in close, inviting individual readings and the invention of individual plans.

Barbara Buckman is a Professor of Art at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, NY. She has also taught at a variety of WNY colleges and universities including Daemen College, SUNY University Of Buffalo, and State University College at Buffalo. She earned her MFA from Hunter College and was awarded the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Fellowship as well as the DIA Foundation fellowship. In 2013 she was awarded the SUNY Chancellors Award for Scholarship and Creative Activity.

Please note that BAS will be CLOSED June 29 – July 4, 2014.

Major exhibition Support:
Double Tree Club Hotel by Hilton Buffalo Downtown
Erie County Cultural Funding
M&T Bank
NYSCA Visual Arts Program
Additional Support:
Ashker’s Juice Bar
North American Breweries
City of Buffalo
Gates Circle Wine & Liquor
Individual donors