Gowanus Canal Evening Painting

Born 1970, Derek Buckner currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, the novelist Joanna Hershon and their two sons Wyatt and Noah.

Derek Buckner utilizes a variety of sources for his paintings video imagery of urban landscapes taken from airplanes and moving cars, models of dystopia's constructed in the studio, and most recently, piles upon piles of ubiquitous marshmallows. What connects Buckner's past works American Perspectives, The UFO series, and now his latest Marshmallow series-- is a focus on density and proliferation.


Multi-level highways spanning indeterminate miles, details of monolithic overpasses, suburban wastelands rendered ominously from a birds eye perspective, rows of buildings, automobiles, concrete. In Buckners paintings the constructed environment has subsumed nature and there seems little possibility for anything excepting perpetual expansion. Buckner relays a sense of discomfort, foreboding and anxiety at such a reality -- and the feeling of disconnectedness from -- both built, and natural environments is palpable. And yet, amidst this inhospitable landscape, there persists an undeniableeven exaltedbeauty.


In the Marshmallow series the intensity of this inquiry has remained, yet Buckner has turned to a more abstract and ambiguous subject. These paintings of tumbling heaps of pink and white and white on white are simultaneously humorous, somewhat grotesque andagainsomehow beautiful. They expertly explore the subtlety of amorphous form, and yet the suggestion of this limitless gelatinous substance is also overwhelming, even sickening.


Derek Buckner grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He went on to study at Vassar College and received his B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Italy, Mexico, East Hampton, and Santa Fe. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections in this country and abroad. His most recent show at the George Billis Gallery in New York was reviewed favorably in the New Yorker, The New York Sun as well as other publications. He has also received reviews in the New York Times and the LA Times and was recently selected by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum for a juried exhibition of young painters.