BERLIN.- What’s in a kiss? It could be everything or nothing; the momentous climax of the story, or only its tentative beginning. There are every day, routine kisses, and desperate, pleading kisses. There are flirtatious kisses that project a world but (agonizingly, deliciously) do not promise it. Sometimes a kiss makes the floor fall out from under you, as in Buckwalter’s A Kiss from the Moon, where the vertical wood grain of floorboards becomes a vertiginous drop, while the moon’s cheeks are kissed from either side by the edges of curtains, making a beam of light fall across a pair of thighs draped over the end of the bed.
In this new body of work by Anne Buckwalter, the delirium of intimacy and furtive erotic encounters is contrasted with the prim order of ornately patterned interiors. Inspired by the decorative crafts of Pennsylvanian Dutch, the opulent floral wallpaper designs of William Morris, and the homely Victorian-inspired textiles of Laura Ashley, these scenes are often constructed with flattened perspectives, rendering them starkly open to a viewer’s curious gaze. Despite the tidy domestic order, an off-kilter, anticipatory sensation prevails: one half expects a painted vase to slide from its shelf; an egg to roll from its dish on the picnic blanket.
The series also alludes to some of the seminal kisses of art history: Schiele’s entangled lovers in Double Self-Portrait (The Embrace); Munch’s The Kiss in Mirror Image; and kisses in cinema too, like the iconic egg scene in Juzo Itami’s Tampopo where a cadmium yellow yolk is swapped sensuously between two open mouths. Simple Projection commemorates a hungry kiss on the breast in a scene from the sapphic coming-of-age film Blue is the Warmest Color. However, Buckwalter never places these sensual encounters in the limelight. They appear instead in mirrors, in pictures on walls, in the pages of open books, or grazing at the painting’s perimeter, just out of reach. Does Buckwalter encourage us, in this way, to see these intimate acts as every day, ordinary, just ‘part of the furniture’? Or are their out-of-frame allusions and suggestive glimpses keen to feed a sense of scandal? Perhaps it can be both. Normalizing sex without stripping it of its excitement. ‘Frustration is a synonym for pleasure’, wrote Buckwalter in a note on the works. ‘We love to want and to not be satisfied so we can keep wanting. Perhaps that is why the kiss is a tantalizing subject for artists; it’s a tease that hints towards consummation but does not manifest it. Like creative practice itself, which is an incessant, agonizing, euphoric chase.’
Text: Bryony Dawson
Anne Buckwalter (b. 1987, Lancaster, PA) lives and works in Durham, Maine. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Uffner & Liu, New York; at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco and MASSIMODECARLO, Paris. Her next solo museum exhibition will take place at the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, PA, in fall 2026.
Her work is in the collections of the Aishti Foundation, Lebanon; X Museum, Beijing, China; Art Museum of West Virginia, Morgantown, WV; the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and Zuzeum, Latvia. She is represented by Uffner & Liu, Pentimenti Gallery, Micki Meng, and Rebecca Camacho Presents.
