SARAH BUCKNER

Sarah Buckner’s new paintings continue the artist’s dream-like motifs, creating a world of her own making, invested with powerful emotional significance. The new works feature mythical figures, literary heroines and real-life characters, transformed in the artist’s imagination and imbued with meaning gleaned from her own life.

With works loosely scattered across the walls of exhibition space, Jeden Kleinen Finger, sogar creates an intimate viewing experience, emphasizing the poetic potency of Buckner’s paintings. Painted walls echo the muted colors of museum collection presentations.

The majority of figures in these new works remain female, among them literary heroines such as Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope described by Homer, or Virgil’s tragic princess Dido. Buckner portrays these women as protagonists in a world in which form and meaning are wedded. The elusive nods to myth or literature are more emotional reference points than sources for these motifs. The depicted figures and situations appear both open-ended and precisely observed, as if emerging from a fully formed narrative of which viewers can only catch a momentary glimpse. The works exude an interiority reminiscent of dreams, where an object can be many incongruous things simultaneously.

Visual markers—the steps of ancient ruin, the outline of a temple complex, or the indentations on the speckled surface of a fossilized sea urchin—enter her paintings as color, texture or shape. Analogously patterns of lines can invoke the meditative qualities of weaving, refer to the spiritual properties of certain motifs in various cultures, or even symbolize the presence of benevolent protector. Transformed in the process of painting, the references remain elusive, even to the artist, she says.

Embracing the traditions of her medium, Buckner produces many of her painting materials, reveling in the laborious processes and their age-old alchemistic associations. The fine chalk, a sediment originating from fossilized microorganisms, and used in her gesso, gives her paintings their creamy texture and smooth matt surface. Buckner mixes many paints from pure pigment and/or ground minerals, experimenting with the distinct viscosity of different colors and their varying opacity. In the past, Buckner has added minerals such as malachite or lapis lazuli to her paints to give her paintings an opalescent shimmer. In some of the paintings on view, she plays with the properties of black iron oxide, exploring different intensities of black hues, and using the material as thick impasto to produce unexpected interactions with other colors. In other new works, the addition of Nickel Titanium yellow has brightened her palette, introducing a range of soft yellow tones. These materials, such as iron oxide, malachite or her gesso’s chalk, connect her practice to an ancient tradition of mark-making, from cave paintings to ancient ceramics, classical fresco painting and the origin of chemistry in alchemy.