OPENING THURSDAY · OCTOBER 22 · 6–8 PM
Bill Buchman
Infinite Oasis
October 22 – November 7, 2026
Bill Buchman, Beyond the Pale, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 60 × 48 in. Price on request
Bill Buchman has been drawing and painting for more than sixty years. On Thursday, at 79, he opens his first solo exhibition in New York. His road here ran through Ithaca, the Lower East Side, Alaska, Woodstock, Boston, Paris and Copenhagen, and Infinite Oasis travels it with him, from prints made in 1965 to canvases finished this year.
1962
“The human figure has been one of the main sources of my art since I began seriously painting and drawing in 1962,” Buchman has written. He was a teenager in New York State, already studying with two of America’s foremost art educators: Victor D’Amico, the Museum of Modern Art’s longtime director of education, and the painter Fletcher Martin. At Cornell he studied with the Abstract Expressionist Robert Richenburg and played in the Mojos, a popular Ithaca rock band.
The earliest works in the exhibition come from those Cornell years. They are portraits, and the line in them is already restless, already improvising.
Bill Buchman, Moontide, 1965. Mixed media on archival paper, 35 × 25 in, framed. $5,000
Bill Buchman, Eclipse, 1966. Woodcut, impression 1/1, 20.5 × 19 in, framed. $5,000
THE LATE SIXTIES
Then he went out into the world. He played in blues bands on the Lower East Side, fought forest fires in Alaska, and drew portraits on the street in Boulder and Aspen.
1971
In 1971 he enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music to study jazz piano, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in its Third Stream program under Ran Blake and Jaki Byard. He played in Boston, on Cape Cod and in Los Angeles, where private study with the art teacher David Pacheco turned him back to painting. The music came with him.
1981
In 1981 Bill moved to Europe: Amsterdam first, then Paris, and after some four years of travel and study, Copenhagen. For sixteen years he painted, exhibited and performed across Scandinavia. Gallerihuset in Copenhagen showed his work almost every year from 1993 to 2012, and the United States Embassy in Copenhagen exhibited him in 1998 and again in 2000.
2001
In 2001 he returned to the United States and settled in Sarasota, Florida, where for many years he taught figure drawing, abstraction and creativity at Ringling College’s Longboat Key Center for the Arts and the Venice Art Center. His book Expressive Figure Drawing (Watson-Guptill, 2010) is used in studios around the world.
NOW
Today Buchman lives and works in New York City, where he still plays jazz piano with current residency at Bryant Park Hotel. He calls his paintings Visual Jazz. The line in those early portraits now runs in oil stick across canvases finished this year, and it has only grown freer.
Bill Buchman, Odysseus, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick, 40 × 36 in. $9,000
Bill Buchman, Achilles, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick, 40 × 36 in. $9,000
Thought and expression in art have no limits. The realm of mind is an infinite oasis, where we can always stop for a drink.
OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, October 22, 6–8 PM
The artist will be present. Free and open to the public.
RSVP for the opening
ON VIEW
October 22 – November 7, 2026
Wednesday–Saturday, 1–6 PM, and by appointment
325 Broome Street 1W, New York
The catalog and price list are available on request. Reply to this email and we will send them to you.
We hope to see you Thursday.
Alex Z. Wang
Founder & Director, Collective Z
Collective Z · 325 Broome Street 1W, New York, NY 10002
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