showcase your art to thousands
of visitors every day

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 Buckner’s 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 undeniable—even exalted—beauty.



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 and—again—somehow 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.

Marshmallows#2

2008
Oil on canvas
76X101

In Ruins

2008
Oil on Panel
28X35

collapse

2008
Oil on canvas

Marshmallow#1

2008
Oil on canvas
76X101

Paredolia

2008
Oil on Linen
84X131

Paredolia#2

2008
Oil on canvas
44X55

UFO Over Buildings

2007
Oil on Linen
28X35

Lost

2007
Oil on Panel
28X35

The Visitor

2007
Oil on Linen
28X35

UFO #18

2007
gouache on paper
25X30

The Wanderer

2008
Oil on canvas
71X56

Scattered

2008
oil oncanvas
213 X 213

Nest

2009
oil on linen
300 x 400

Tower #1

2009
oil on linen
250" x 3000"

Tower #2

2009
400 x 400

Folds

2009
oil on linen
300" x 400"