“Peckin Order” 1996

Artist: Greg Busch

Sold- Private Collection

Hierarchy takes form in feathers and beaks. In Peckin Order, Greg Busch explores the architecture of dominance through repetition, rhythm, and restraint. A series of herons — rendered in a gradient of yellows, reds, and burnt oranges — intersect, confront, and mirror each other across horizontal bands, their sharp beaks poised in tension.

But these aren’t just birds. They’re metaphors: for power structures, gendered dynamics, silent rivalries. The avian stare-down becomes human — a coded language of control and proximity. Between each layer, a suggestion of the body interrupts, reframes, and complicates the image. Whose body? Whose order?

The composition is bold, graphic, and impeccably measured — each quadrant like a visual stanza in a poem about quiet aggression. It’s one of Busch’s most formally refined and psychologically charged works from the 1990s, a study in both visual balance and emotional imbalance.

Peckin Order is a masterclass in minimal elements wielded for maximum metaphor — and a cornerstone in the artist’s earlier explorations of conflict, symmetry, and identity.