The Brooklyn Rail

In Lover’s Knot, Anne Buckwalter reminds us that although there is no place like home, that feeling of bliss often co-exists with complexities, ambiguities, and ambivalences. Comprising twenty-five paintings (all works 2025), the artist’s third exhibition at Uffner & Liu offers familiar yet surprising explorations of the intricacies inherent in notions of home. Continuing her signature depictions of rural life, Buckwalter sharpens her focus to examine some of its quaint details—paintings on the wall, patterned dishes in a display cabinet, the chicken coop in the yard, knickknacks, our ever-present technological devices—in order to signify the various states of messy contradiction in which we live. Her scenes reference historical and contemporary stylings, such as craft and Rococo, and draw from the traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, informing the materials and objects populating the work. Across the paintings, textures such as lace and woodgrain are rendered with precision, rewarding long looking and careful study. She also includes small experiments with gouache, her material of choice, to highlight how it can give light a radiant subtlety. In Lover’s Knot, the painting from which the exhibition takes its name, an overhead fixture illuminates a throw blanket folded across the back of a sofa, stitched using the traditional pattern of the title, while a sliver of daylight cracks the darkness of the room portrayed in Precarious Arrangement.

Interwoven throughout the quaint scenes of home life are animating figures of all genders. Rather than foreground them, the tangled limbs and naked bodies in various configurations are allowed to simply exist rather than serving purely as titillating fodder for the erotic imagination. Seed Sorting details evidence of choosing seeds for a new planting season, a prosaic task. Seed packets are strewn across a large wooden table alongside gardening accoutrements—gloves for encountering the soil, a spade for its tilling and turning, and a watering can to finish. Rubber boots and red panties, nearby on the floor, along with a figure’s bare pelvis visible beneath the table, disrupt the narrative, confusing evidence of the objects’ meaning. In Corner Still Life with Peaches, Buckwalter makes it easy for viewers to lose themselves in the wallpaper’s mesmerizing pattern of flowers, foliage, and trailing vines rendered in richly saturated shades of green, blue, red, and lemon yellow. Paired female figures, interspersed among the flora and fauna, seamlessly complete the geometric pattern, their bright blue bodies implying the motion of a seated, tandem straddle. A painting within the painting, a still life of a bowl of peaches resting on a blue-checkered tablecloth hangs on the embellished wall.

Several works incorporate elements from Buckwalter’s own life, such as her cat, books in her library and studio, or views of her yard. In Living Room with Antique Chairs and Anäis Nin Rug, a line from Henry and June, Nin’s 1986 book based on material excerpted from her unpublished diaries, follows the rug’s red flower border and reads, “I would have sat on the floor with my head against her knees if she had wanted to yesterday.” A cat lounges in the lower-right corner, its one good eye meeting the viewer’s gaze while its companion, a chocolate canine, lounges at the rug’s opposite corner, seemingly unbothered by anything happening in the scene. In the background, two ebony wooden armchairs feature images of figures engaged in erotic intimacies: one couple, naked and embracing on their sides, their faces level with their partner’s pelvis, the other pair a close view of a face hovering over a bare breast. New quilt studies find Buckwalter testing ideas for what might one day become actual quilts. The detailed geometry of the construction mimics the different fabrics that a quilter might use. In Quilt Study (Spread Eagle), a facedown figure’s limbs painted in various patchwork designs are bound to the four corners of a traditional poster bed, creating a colorful scene of bondage. Here, the figure dominates while simultaneously blending into the pattern of the quilt, its kink to be worked out smoothly.

Through these works, Buckwalter prompts us to be adventurous, to break up the mundane, as this too is an important component of what creates the feeling of home. Buckwalter gives us what we want in Lover’s Knot—the familiar, the regular, and the comfortable combined with life’s spiciness, allowing us to rethink notions of the body, domesticity, and desire. In a time when rights and human dignities become increasingly restricted and marginalized people’s bodies are increasingly under scrutiny and surveillance, perhaps remembering to embrace life’s intimate pleasures can offer a slight reprieve.