Art Painting

Anna Weyant’s Uncanny Work Breathe New Life into Feminine Portraiture

Artwork

Ayanna Dozier

Set up picture of “Anna Weyant: Child, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over,” at Gagosian, 2022. Photograph by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Anna Weyant’s work of girls are without delay pleasant and but surprisingly grotesque because of the artist’s emphasis on voluptuous our bodies and distorted facial expressions. Her work conjure figures harking back to ourselves however with an uncanny high quality.

Within the 1980 e book The Powers of Horror, scholar Julia Kristeva described abjection as concurrently alien to us but surprisingly acquainted—not in contrast to a monster or a human corpse, which will be recognized as each a person in addition to one thing faraway from us. Weyant’s work of abjection invite new examinations of femininity inside the historic media panorama that overemphasizes breasts and curves. Partaking with this iconography, she without delay subverts it via characters that exist in surreal and uncanny environments.

The 27-year-old painter is quick rising as a high expertise within the artwork world. Born in Calgary, Canada, and at present based mostly in New York, Weyant acquired her BFA in portray from the acclaimed Rhode Island Faculty of Design and a level from the China Academy of Artwork in Hangzhou. Her painterly type is a contemporary twist on the Baroque custom, following Dutch masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Judith Leysterwith a touch of affect from Twentieth-century artists like Balthus and John Currin.

Anna Weyant, Two Eileens, 2022. © Anna Weyant. Photograph by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Anna Weyant, Sophie, 2022. © Anna Weyant. Photograph by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Weyant closes a unprecedented 12 months together with her solo exhibition “Child, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over” at Gagosian, which introduced illustration of the artist this previous Might. Separate from this achievement, her work made a gargantuan splash on the secondary market throughout the three main public sale homes Phillips, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s throughout this 12 months’s spring auctions in New York. At Sotheby’s “The Now” sale, her 2020 portray Falling Lady offered for $1.6 million, eight occasions its excessive estimate of $200,000.

“Child, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over,” on view via December twenty third, performs with the notion of the double. Represented throughout Weyant’s work, the multiplication of her figures invitations a way of strangeness as half of the pair grimaces whereas the opposite smiles. These doubles—featured in free clothes to show their typically voluptuous figures—bother the picture and are harking back to the peculiarities of femininity that bleed into monstrosity. Right here, the horror isn’t a fanged creature, however is just moderately what lurks beneath a “excellent” floor that creates a way of abjection from the self.

Set up picture of Anna Weyant, Two Eileens and Venus, 2022, in “Child, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over,” at Gagosian, 2022. Photograph by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian.

Take the hanging portray Venus (2022), which options two ladies of shade with comparable options, rendered in vivid browns. With one determine dealing with in the direction of the viewer and the opposite wanting away, this work, just like the portray Two Eileens (2022), makes use of the motif of doubling to play with familiarity and oddity. We’re left to look at whether or not the depicted characters are twins or maybe the identical particular person present at totally different deadlines, introduced collectively via the facility of portray. Not in contrast to Jasper Johns’s use of the double throughout his oeuvre, Weyant distorts what’s recognizable a few physique and severs one’s sense of self.

That includes home settings in a proscenium presentation, the Gagosian exhibition captures the intimacy of Weyant’s work. Within the melancholic but adoring nonetheless life It Should Have Been Love (2022), a eating desk turns into an area for wilting and blooming flowers. The disquiet nature of the portray is heightened by the sense that it’s the solely residing factor round, not in contrast to the nonetheless lifes of the Dutch custom. Weyant’s modern return to this second reminds us of how unfamiliar or unaccustomed we have now grow to be with stillness in right now’s technological age.

Set up picture of “Anna Weyant: Child, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over,” at Gagosian, 2022. Photograph by Rob McKeever. Courtesy of Gagosian.

The strangeness of Weyant’s home settings can partially be defined by the setting through which the artist produces her work: her lounge, which she transformed right into a studio over the previous 12 months. “One of many work was too giant to be stretched in my house,” she advised Artsy, “so I hung the uncooked canvas on the wall and let the underside roll onto the ground. That’s how I labored on it.”

Weyant’s house studio contextualizes the privateness that usually shrouds her work, whereas the act of portray permits her to step outdoors of herself to alter or manipulate that intimacy. “I believe we’re most delicate to, or most protecting of, the components of ourselves that we attempt to disguise, the locations the place we really feel disgrace—perhaps in rage, grief, lack of management,” she mentioned. “There’s an intimacy, a tenderness or delicacy, in the place we’re our most monstrous.”

Anna Weyant, It Should Have Been Love, 2022. © Anna Weyant. Photograph by Rob McKeever Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.

Along with her work excessive in demand throughout each main and secondary markets, Weyant has certainly taken off within the artwork world. Whereas her public sale success is noteworthy, it’s one thing that’s abject to Weyant herself. “I discover it to be a bit surreal,” she defined. “The secondary market—it’s out of my arms. I’m not concerned bodily or emotionally.”

As her meteoric 12 months attracts to a detailed, Weyant is already starting to look towards new work in 2023. “I’m wanting ahead to quiet, snowy portray days,” she mentioned. Little doubt, she is going to search stillness within the new 12 months amid the artwork world commotion surrounding her apply.

Ayanna Dozier

Ayanna Dozier is Artsy’s Workers Author.

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