“Deborah Buck’s first solo exhibition at JENNIFER BAAHNG, Deborah Buck: Witches Bridge, on the Upper East Side, is curated as a small survey spanning her forty-year career. Buck’s earlier work is a fresh discovery and confirms that she has been an astute observer of painting culture and a lover of paint from the beginning. The works are populated with sensually painted, strange, centralized forms that recall the lineage of neo-expressionist paintings from the late 1970s to the 1980s. “Bridge” is an appropriate word to ponder upon Buck’s work, as the relationship between past and present and her chosen themes are apparent in this exhibition. One anticipates the continuation of bold evolutions in years to come. Between oil and water, paper and panel, and a woman’s power in society, we observe how the metaphysical nature of Buck’s early work translates into critiques and satirical undertakings of the discomforts felt today. Buck imagines narratives that probe; these invented worlds would’ve never been known without her meandering brush. The freedom in her recent exploration of abstraction is most felt as a hard-won stability instilled with exaltation.”