FEBRUARY 25 - APRIL 9, 2025

Exhibition Opening with the Artist
Tuesday, February 25th, 5 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Still Life at Home, a solo exhibition of new gouache on panel and gouache on paper works by artist Anne Buckwalter. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on Tuesday, February 25th from 5:00 – 7:00 PM. This will be Buckwalter’s first exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

Still Life at Home is a meditation on the small pleasures of rural life, and the intersection of domesticity, interiority, and erotic imagination. The paintings focus on the rituals of housework and daily rural living. Seasons change, as seen in the background of the compositions, but there is a striking loyalty to the serenity of an interior world despite an ever-changing exterior one.

Living in rural Maine, Buckwalter found that “in the undistracted stillness, there is the invitation to obsess, to fantasize, to burrow inwards and see how deep you can go.” This body of work calls attention to the artist’s close-looking at simple details mixed with unexpectedly provocative subject matter.

Strawberry Jam depicts a scene where a steaming pot sits on the stove beside a bowl of softened strawberries. On the shelf above, a nude statuette can be seen among mugs, a candle, and a patterned pitcher. “I see my work as a kind of exercise in making what is boring erotic, and what is erotic boring,” says Buckwalter. Her childhood home was full of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, decorative crafts, painted furniture, and textiles. These items bring her a sense of comfort and finding their way into her current home and into her paintings, create an ideal environment for these juxtapositions to occur.

Buckwalter strives to create work where viewers can comfortably engage with a potentially uncomfortable subject. She is interested in normalizing sex and sexuality, appreciating it as a meaningful topic deserving of intellectual attention, and de-sensationalizing it by situating the erotic within the context of the everyday.

Figures are not always seen in her interiors, but when they are, they are cropped or shown through a door in the background of the work in a way that conceals their faces, and sometimes even their gender. Their actions, therefore, take precedence. In Knees in the Moonlight, a couple’s legs are seen entangled in bed while in Snowstorm Breakfast, a female figure nude from the waist down enjoys a meal of eggs, toast, and avocado as snow falls outside.

Pretzel Day displays a variety of objects across a large kitchen that only hint at the homeowner’s actions. While some items are explicit, others make viewers question what is and what is not meant to be suggestive, achieving Buckwalter’s intention to blur the lines of sexuality and its perception.

Anne Buckwalter (b. 1987, Lancaster, PA)

Anne Buckwalter’s creative practice explores female identity and the coexistence of contradictory elements. Inspired by the folk art traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, her work arranges disparate objects in mysterious domestic interiors and ambiguous spaces. By imagining obscure narratives that embrace paradoxes, her paintings delve into questions about the body, femininity, sexuality, and desire.

Anne is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2020 Idea Fund Grant, and a 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Galveston Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Studios at Mass MoCA, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her solo exhibition, Manors, will open at the Farnsworth Art Museum in February 2025. Her exhibition history includes the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Boston University Gallery, Boston, MA; The Painting Center, New York, NY, and others. Her paintings have been highlighted in New American Paintings, Juxtapoz, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times, and included in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Aishti Foundation, Lebanon; Zuzeum, Latvia; X Museum, Beijing; Art Museum of West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York, NY), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Micki Meng (San Francisco, CA), and Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco, CA). Anne currently lives and works in Durham, Maine.