New Paintings by Derrick Buisch Featured in CHROMA EXHIBITION through April 13th

Derrick Buisch’s abstract paintings are known for jolting color combinations and playful symbols from pop culture. UFOs, color charts, signage, and imaginary monsters are some of his favorite subjects. While exploring color, he also tweaks his visual vocabulary to keep it fresh and inventive.

A Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997, Derrick Buisch’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries regionally and nationally.  In 2016 he was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors.

I believe in the importance of the reflective space provided by painting. I relish the slow time in both the making and the reading of the work. These paintings are distilled chaos riddled with small incidences of uneasy hilarity, which create a rigorous abstraction that is simultaneously evocative and elusive

-Derrick Busich

I consistently seek out new ways to experiment within the narrow avenues of paint on canvas. Certain marks, signs, scribbles, and gestures are repeated using projection, stencils, and transfers. A vocabulary of visual chatter celebrates the distortions, interruptions, and interference within the painted surface. These works are very straightforward, taking on subjects like imaginary monsters and fantastic objects. The blunt, naïve nature of the subjects serves as an easy foil/mask, allowing for a range of rich experimentation with paint chemistry, color, installations, and scale. The physical properties of the medium are constantly stressed, questioned, tweaked, and recalibrated to keep the working visual vocabulary fresh and inventive. 

-Derrick Buisch

The surfaces vary in the types of paint application employed, revealing the element of time involved in making the painting. These paintings are developed at different rates, incorporating varying degrees of pigment and oil. Subtle changes in color and surface tone evoke compressed shifts in the visual space. The differences in paint viscosity are subtle and precise and extremely important in differentiating each painting. Ultimately the surface of these paintings are luscious and mysterious

-Derrick Buisch