ARTSEEN | OCTOBER 2025
Anne Buckwalter: Lover’s Knot
By Lee Ann Norman
In Lover’s Knot, Anne Buckwalter reminds us that although there is no place like home, that feeling of bliss often co-exists with complexities, ambiguities, and ambivalences. Comprising twenty-five paintings (all works 2025), the artist’s third exhibition at Uffner & Liu offers familiar yet surprising explorations of the intricacies inherent in notions of home. Continuing her signature depictions of rural life, Buckwalter sharpens her focus to examine some of its quaint details—paintings on the wall, patterned dishes in a display cabinet, the chicken coop in the yard, knickknacks, our ever-present technological devices—in order to signify the various states of messy contradiction in which we live. Her scenes reference historical and contemporary stylings, such as craft and Rococo, and draw from the traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, informing the materials and objects populating the work. Across the paintings, textures such as lace and woodgrain are rendered with precision, rewarding long looking and careful study. She also includes small experiments with gouache, her material of choice, to highlight how it can give light a radiant subtlety. In Lover’s Knot, the painting from which the exhibition takes its name, an overhead fixture illuminates a throw blanket folded across the back of a sofa, stitched using the traditional pattern of the title, while a sliver of daylight cracks the darkness of the room portrayed in Precarious Arrangement.
Interwoven throughout the quaint scenes of home life are animating figures of all genders. Rather than foreground them, the tangled limbs and naked bodies in various configurations are allowed to simply exist rather than serving purely as titillating fodder for the erotic imagination. Seed Sorting details evidence of choosing seeds for a new planting season, a prosaic task. Seed packets are strewn across a large wooden table alongside gardening accoutrements—gloves for encountering the soil, a spade for its tilling and turning, and a watering can to finish. Rubber boots and red panties, nearby on the floor, along with a figure’s bare pelvis visible beneath the table, disrupt the narrative, confusing evidence of the objects’ meaning. In Corner Still Life with Peaches, Buckwalter makes it easy for viewers to lose themselves in the wallpaper’s mesmerizing pattern of flowers, foliage, and trailing vines rendered in richly saturated shades of green, blue, red, and lemon yellow. Paired female figures, interspersed among the flora and fauna, seamlessly complete the geometric pattern, their bright blue bodies implying the motion of a seated, tandem straddle. A painting within the painting, a still life of a bowl of peaches resting on a blue-checkered tablecloth hangs on the embellished wall.
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