ANNE BUCKWALTER

ROOM KEY

APRIL 17 - JUNE 5, 2021

EXHIBITION PREMIERE
Saturday, April 17 | 12 PM - 5 PM by appointment

VIRTUAL ARTIST TALK
Thursday, May 6 | 5:30 PM

Pentimenti Gallery welcomes spring with a solo exhibition of the work of Anne Buckwalter. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Anne Buckwalter’s paintings draw on an inherited legacy of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, but utilize those composition and design motifs to take on contemporary and deeply personal themes. With their dark, muted colors and quality of set stillness, the works exist in a parallel reality that is haunted by both the present and the past. Buckwalter paints an experience of invitational voyeurism in which she leads the viewer through a setting that can be read as fictional, or as a kind of self-portraiture and self-reflection.

In Room Key, Buckwalter presents multiple series of gouache paintings on panel, categorized as Bedrooms, Living Rooms, and Outdoors. Despite the distinction, these bodies of work are deeply interconnected and narrative, and all seem to occupy a shared atmospheric environment.

The flattened, dreamlike perspective of her scenarios draws attention to the tiniest and most surprising details, rendered frankly and with a callus irony. Portraits and figures are given equal treatment and rendering to dirty laundry, sex toys, and the repeating patterns of wallpaper and flooring. The images organize a room’s content without priority, and with a sort of starkness and dark humor that juxtapose the jovial, non-combative implications of the folk art style.

Buckwalter delivers a complicated idea of visual identity, in which the portrait is either absent or treated with no more distinction than the floorboards. And yet the work has a particular quality of humanity, treating the understanding of one’s self as both mundane and deeply shocking.

Anne Buckwalter received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, and her MFA from Maine College of Art. She is the recipient of a 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2020 Idea Fund Grant, and a 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Her recent residencies include Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and more. She has exhibited at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The Painting Center, New York, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Boston University Gallery, Boston, MA; and others.

To ease concerns about COVID-19, we will be following strict social distancing protocols. RSVPs are required to attend the Exhibition Premiere.

For all inquiries and to RSVP, please contact us at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 215.625.9990.