PETER BUCHMAN — Mixed Media Innovator

Peter Buchman (born 1959, Jacksonville) is a multidisciplinary American artist whose work merges pop-art sensibilities with layered, conceptual mixed media. While his practice has roots in representational pop art, Buchman’s canvases are anything but literal. His surfaces are dense with texture, embedded images, hidden portraits, and what he calls “Art Brut immigrant portraits,” works designed to provoke, invite, and challenge the viewer’s perceptual assumptions.

Buchman earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, later completing a six-week sculpture residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York (2010). These academic foundations opened pathways for him to explore broad material experimentation, including mixed media, plexiglass constructions, resin and enamel layering, and his distinctive “voice-over” works, conceptual pieces that integrate text, linguistic play, and visual texture to create multilayered narratives.

A hallmark of Buchman’s practice is the interplay between language and image. His “voice-over” series incorporates colloquial phrases, cultural references, pop-culture humor, and coded messaging, blending them with textural surfaces built from wood, plexiglass, resin, enamel, and layered mixed media. His process of building up material and then sanding, scraping, or excavating it, mirrors the layered nature of personal and collective memory, diaspora, communication, and identity.

Buchman has exhibited widely across the United States and internationally. He has held solo shows at Kidder Smith Gallery (Boston) and Vered Gallery (Easthampton, NY) and participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the Delaware Art Museum (Wilmington, DE), the Hong Kong Biennale (2007), Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY), Montclair University Gallery (NJ), the Ball State University Gallery (IN), and The Other Art Fair (Bristol, England). His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Southampton Press. Over the course of his career, Buchman’s pieces have entered major private and public collections, owned by figures such as Beth Rudin DeWoody, Nicole Miller, David Yurman, and Howard Schultz.

Explore Peter Buchman at DTR Modern Galleries

DTR Modern Galleries features a curated selection of Peter Buchman’s mixed-media works across our contemporary program in New York, Boston, Palm Beach, and Washington, D.C. His layered surfaces, conceptual “voice-over” pieces, and pop-inflected mixed media appear alongside our broader roster of modern and post-war artists, resonating with collectors who value bold visual language and a multidimensional narrative approach.