Debra Baxter ALL I EVER WANTED

March 27 to April 25, 2025
Artist’s Opening, Thursday, March 27, 6 to 8PM

IMAGES FROM THE EXHIBITION
Debra Baxter's Five Perfect Pillows, Jen Graves, The Stranger
Debra Baxter: All I Ever Wanted, Suzanne Beal, International Sculpture Center blog
Debra Baxter, Matthew Kangas. Visual Art Source

Platform Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition of sculpture by Debra Baxter titled ALL I EVER WANTED. Baxter’s new body of work continues her investigation into power plays, vulnerability, and the body. Her work wrestles with the physical and emotional power of longing and attraction. She often pairs her carved rock elements with glass, metal, crystals and minerals, setting up a formal contrast that results in a mash-up of beauty and repulsion. In her work, Baxter creates a kind of otherworldliness that transcends physical reality making her sculptures talismanic. Her unique materials and processes give tangible form to experiences that are often inexplicable.

A key component of this show is the piece Soft Landing (or crashing and burning). This work is a three-dimensional version of Albrecht Dürer’s drawing Six Studies of Pillows (dated 1493; collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Baxter has been obsessed with this drawing ever since she first carved a pillow in 2009. The pillows in Dürer’s drawing seem to wrestle with their own physicality. Contorting and stretching in impossible ways, they anthropomorphize a human struggle, longing to relate to a body.

Debra Baxter received her MFA in Sculpture from Bard College. Her work has been exhibited in London, Paris, New York, Minneapolis, Vancouver, BC, Sun Valley, and Seattle. Her work has been discussed in Zoo Magazine (Germany), Edelweiss Magazine (Switzerland), Zink, Art Ltd., Design Bureau, and Sculpture Magazine. Some of her pieces will be in the upcoming book and traveling show On Body and Soul: Contemporary Armor to Amulets by Suzanne Ramljak.