Gagosian today announced the gallery’s global representation of painter Anna Weyant. The artist will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the gallery in New York this fall.
Weyant’s precisely rendered paintings depict figures embroiled in tragicomic narratives, and still-life compositions in which everyday objects adopt an uncanny, portentous air. Far from presenting these individuals and items as generalized types, however, she employs a keen ironic wit to evoke their myriad idiosyncrasies and contradictions.
Among the first works that Weyant exhibited is a sequence of darkly cinematic vignettes depicting a dollhouse and the strange, cloistered lives of its inhabitants. A more recent series deconstructs the representation of American suburbia in made-for-TV movies, casting it as a surreal realm in which violence lurks just beneath the surface. And in her still lifes, Weyant depicts flowers and other items in a similarly unsettling light; Lily (2021), for example, juxtaposes the titular bloom with a revolver bound in gold ribbon.
After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Weyant studied at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and in these images her technical accomplishment is clear. Drawing on influences ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to contemporary painters Ellen Berkenblit and Jennifer Packer, she conveys an understanding of her work’s roots while eliciting an immediate and emotional response.
Anna Weyant was born in 1995 in Calgary, Canada, and lives and works in New York. Group exhibitions include HUMANMAKES, Recharge Foundation, Singapore (2020); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); and Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2022).
