WALL POWER
Julie Brener Davich
Anne Buckwalter at Uffner & Liu: Long before “cottagecore” became part of the mainstream—before Audrey Gelman opened the Six Bells, and Dôen dresses and William Morris fabrics became de rigueur—there was Anne Buckwalter. Raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country, Buckwalter, now in her late 30s, paints country interiors in gouache on wood panels, with quaint flourishes like floral wallpaper, folk furniture, hooked rugs, and cross-stitch samplers. She depicts entire rooms or zooms in on particular tableaux, such as a dining table set for a meal. She plays with patterns, like wood grain or intricate lace, and flattens the perspective, which makes the objects on the tables and dressers appear ready to slide right off.
Coming off a summer exhibition at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine, where she lives, Buckwalter is showing her latest works at Uffner & Liu gallery on the Lower East Side. If you look closely at the paintings, you’ll find unmistakable hints of desire. The decorations on some of the depicted stoneware pitchers and chairbacks are nudes, some of them in sexual positions. In several paintings, the eroticism is more overt, with figures seen through lace curtains or peeking out from underneath tables—but always partially obscured, and never showing their faces. “She’s asking, ‘What does it mean to be a woman in the home?’” gallery partner Lucy Liu explained to me, “and contrasting that with the liberal feeling that can exist in that space.”
Her new series of gouaches on paper, which start at $4,000, are quilt patterns, with sexual elements hidden in the fabrics. (The show title, Lover’s Knot, is also a quilt pattern.) The paintings are priced at $8,000 to $25,000. The Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, is in talks to bring her Farnsworth exhibition, Manors, there. Otherwise, you have until November 1 to see her show downtown.
