DENVER, CO.- Robischon Gallery presents the highly-compelling work of distinguished American artist John Buck. Buck’s intricate and commanding kinetic wood sculptures will be prominently featured in an extensive summer showing along with the artist’s additional series of medium and large-scale, free-standing figurative sculptures, carved wood panels and wood block prints. Exhibiting in parallel to Colorado’s Biennial of the Americas 2015, John Buck’s provocative artworks reflect and explore a wide range of cultural ideas and global topics. The mesmerizing and symbolic works reveal an expansive and committed inquiry by the artist into many complex societal issues, while providing the viewer the opportunity to experience the sheer wonder and inventiveness of the artist-as-seeker. The several new and recent works engage visually on a folkloric level through their materials of unpainted jelutong wood and peg construction, while their sophisticated and masterfully carved elements make visible the direct and truthful mark of artist’s chisel. Balance is a driving force in all of John Buck’s works, from their perfectly measured, hand-hewn elements, to the functionality and marvel of the artist’s kinetics. Each sculptural artwork is built with a kind of weighted scale in mind and is exquisitely assembled with intent to balance not only from one side to the other, but also with regard to content. Often a marriage of both historical and contemporary references, the sculptures, carved wall panels and colorful wood block prints, are brimming with symbolism and invite the viewer to speculate and interpret their many layered meanings. Engaged and resonant with the world that surrounds, John Buck’s wit, intricate compositions and stimulating subject matter further ignite the visual in ways both unexpected and illuminating.
John Buck received a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, Kansas City, MO and an MFA from University of California, Davis and also attended the well-known Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. He has been honored as a recipient of numerous honors including a National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Artist Grant, a National Artists Award, an Outstanding Nationally Recognized Alumnus in Sculpture award from The Kansas City Art Institute, the Governor’s Arts Award from the Montana Arts Council and was the Artist of the Year at the Yellowstone Art Museum, among others. His work has been exhibited across the US and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Seattle Art Museum, Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana and many more.
