FlashArt

Hidden in Plain Sight. Anne Buckwalter in Conversation with Katherine Bradford

8 September 2025, 9:00 am CET

When Katherine Bradford stopped by Anne Buckwalter’s studio in Maine earlier this summer, Buckwalter was in the middle of finishing a new series of paintings. The two artists quickly fell into an easy conversation about bodies and the ways intimacy finds its way into art. They compared notes on growing up around purity culture, painting figures without faces or genitals, and how eroticism can be both radical and ordinary at the same time. Their talk moved the way their paintings do — back and forth between humor and seriousness, with a lot of curiosity in between. At one point Bradford teased Buckwalter about hiding erotic details in plain sight; later Buckwalter asked Bradford is she thought her own figures had secret erotic lives. Both painters have new shows opening in New York this fall — Buckwalter’s “Lover’s Knot” at Uffner & Liu and Bradford’s latest work at CANADA — but here, in the studio, the conversation was less about milestones and more about the shared joys and risks of making art.

Katherine Bradford: I’m sitting in your studio in Maine, surrounded by your new paintings that are going to New York for your September show. I’ve just seen your beautiful exhibition at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine, and what I’m noticing is that you’ve taken some new steps with this work. I was hoping we could talk about that.

Anne Buckwalter: Sure. Some of the dishes and furniture in this new body of work have erotic narratives painted on them, and that’s a new direction for me.

KB: In the past, the erotic components of your paintings were, as you say, hidden in plain sight — you had to look for them, and you were surprised when you found them. But in this new body of work, you foreground them more. Right here, there’s a painting of two young women with no clothes on —  that’s very new. I’m looking at a table with a very detailed, meticulously painted tablecloth, and clearly under the table are two females entwined. It’s such a contrast. 

AB: I have often painted zoomed-out rooms that showed everything, with small erotic details tucked in — a sex toy, or a figure in a mirror. Lately, I’ve been changing up the scale. These feel more like still lives set in interior spaces, and because I scaled up the size of the objects, it made sense to make the bodies bigger too. They’ve become larger focal points. 

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