Zolla/Lieberman Gallery is pleased to present New Sculptures & Prints, an exhibition by John Buck, and Petrographic-Prints & Drawings, featuring recent work by Hunter Buck. The exhibition opens on June 7 and runs through August 17; an opening reception will be held on Friday, June 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This will be John Buck’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery and Hunter Buck’s first.

Inspired by contemporary social issues, folk art, and modernist painting and sculpture, John Buck playfully combines abstraction with the human form to delve into the creation of meaning and narrative. By integrating symbols and stylistic elements taken from sources as diverse as religious iconography and pop culture, Buck’s woodblock panels, crayon rubbings, and sculptures reflect back on the colorful, tangled state of affairs between ourselves and our universe.

Buck’s jelutong wood and bronze figures, part of an on-going series, are composed of balanced and graceful systems of abstractions stemming from single, headless, human bodies. His newest series of panels are based on woodblocks that he began creating in 1980. They are included though a technique that is a recent addition to his printmaking process, in which the original is reproduced with a laser cutter, duplicating the image that was first drawn onto a woodblock with ballpoint pen. This process creates background information which is then painted onto. The intricate panels and rubbings vibrate with activity. Every detail is in flux in Buck’s depiction of the theater of humanity: kissing angles and a ghost rallying at a press conference, cog-filled machines spinning and chugging away with no discernible function, molecules hurtling through space, bodies in peril and bones floating down the river. A video of a recent exhibition of kinetic sculptures at Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, LA, will also be on view.

John Buck (born 1946) lives and works in Bozeman, MT, and Hawaiʻi. His most recent solo exhibition C’est Magnifique was shown at the Paul and Lulu Hillard University Art Museum in Lafayette, LA. A traveling exhibition of his work, John Buck: Iconography, has been featured at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, CA; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT; Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA; Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; and the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA. Buck’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others.

Petrographic-Prints & Drawings includes relief engravings, stone lithographs, and mototypes that Hunter Buck has drawn, painted, and marked on with found objects, all of them inspired by a recent stay in Iceland during the summer of 2012. The title of the exhibition refers to the artist’s multi-layered process and is a compound of the Latin words “petro” meaning stone and “graph” to scratch. Isolating individual earthy masses from their environment, Hunter Buck’s floating landscapes draw on his impressions of the area as “profound, vast and empty of comforts.” The buildup of layers creates an image that is craggy and multifaceted, reflecting the artist’s fascination with complex color and texture patterns witnessed in Iceland.

Hunter Buck (born 1987) currently resides in Oakland, CA. In 2012 he received his BFA from the California College of the Arts with an emphasis in painting and printmaking.

For further information, please call 312-944-1990 or email zollalieberman@sbcglobal.net.

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Tags: Hunter Buck, John Buck, River North, Zolla/Lieberman