About
The hapless subjects of Anna Weyant’s indelible paintings and drawings are recurrently tested by everyday circumstances, weathering what the artist has described as “low-stakes trauma.” In these precisely rendered scenes, figures—most often young and female—find themselves embroiled in tragicomic narratives with an ironic twinge, offering a dreamlike insight into the capacity of popular culture and social convention to manufacture and distort gestures, rituals, and signifiers of femininity. But far from presenting her protagonists as merely symbolic, Weyant remains sensitive to their human idiosyncrasies and contradictions, picturing characters who are endearing, mysterious, and wholly themselves. In her crystalline still-life compositions, meanwhile, everyday objects adopt an uncanny, portentous air.
Weyant was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1995. After earning a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, she relocated to New York, then studied painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Moving back to New York, she worked as a studio assistant while pursuing her own practice. Among her first exhibited works is a sequence of darkly cinematic canvases depicting a dollhouse—modeled after one that she owned as a child—and its young female inhabitants. A later series deconstructs the appearance of American suburbia in Lifetime’s made-for-television movies, casting it as a surreal realm in which violence and disaster lurk just beneath the surface. In her still lifes, Weyant depicts fruit, flowers, and other items in a similarly unsettling light; Lily (2021), for example, juxtaposes the titular bloom with a revolver bound in gold ribbon.
In these and other works, Weyant employs a somber, muted palette of deep greens, dusty pinks, and deep black. She also draws on art historical and present-day influences, from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to twentieth-century mavericks like Balthus to contemporary painters Jennifer Packer and Ellen Berkenblit. As revealed in her contributions to group exhibitions including and I will wear you in my heart of heart at FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); and Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2022), Weyant displays a deep understanding and appreciation of her work’s roots and parallels while eliciting an immediate and emotional response.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Screening and Talk
Anna Weyant
Austin Weyant
Friday, March 22, 2024, 6:30pm
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
This event is sold out.
Join Anna Weyant and her brother, actor Austin Weyant, for a conversation and screening on the occasion of Anna Weyant Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of an ongoing series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. The pair will introduce the selected films—Lost in Translation (2003), Gone Girl (2014), and Parasite (2019)—which explore power dynamics, complexities, and deceptions in relationships and wider society, as well as discuss the impact film has had on their respective practices. After the talk, Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola, will be screened.
Still from Lost in Translation (2003), directed by Sofia Coppola
Screening
Anna Weyant Selects
March 22–April 2, 2024
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
Anna Weyant has curated a selection of three films as part of an ongoing series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. Weyant comments, “The experience of watching each of these films is markedly different with respect to their individual style, storytelling, aesthetic, and dialogue. When I consider what it is about these stories that resonates with me, I am repeatedly drawn to their through lines of the power dynamics, complexities, and deceptions in relationships (and society); the uneasiness that comes from not fully knowing one’s surroundings (or the company one keeps); and our inherent desires for connection in an increasingly isolating world.”
Featured films include
Lost in Translation (2003, directed by Sofia Coppola)
Gone Girl (2014, directed by David Fincher)
Parasite (2019, directed by Bong Joon Ho)
Still from Gone Girl (2013), directed by David Fincher
Commission
Anna Weyant
La Forza del Destino
January 30–March 31, 2024
Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York
www.metopera.org
As part of the Gallery Met Banners project, the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned Anna Weyant to create a painting to celebrate the staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Italian opera La Forza del Destino. The work will be reproduced in the form of a sixty-foot banner installed on the façade of Lincoln Center in New York during the production. Weyant’s painting, which shares the same name as the opera, portrays Leonora, the tortured principal character, with closed eyes, bright red lips, and a single visible pearl earring. The words “Forza” and “Destino” are rendered in a vintage font with a scarlet hue and bloody “dripping” effect, evoking posters for classic Italian-made horror movies of the 1950s and ’60s.
Anna Weyant, La Forza del Destino, 2023, installation view, Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York © Anna Weyant. Photo: Jonathan Tichler/Met Opera
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Richard Prince, Untitled, 2015, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut © Richard Prince
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Friends & Lovers
October 6, 2023–January 20, 2024
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org
Friends & Lovers is an expansive group exhibition that centers on the relationships between fifty artists and their subjects and explores the infinite ways in which we are influenced by our inner circles. Just as a studio visit opens a window onto an artist’s creative process, whom the artists choose to immortalize through their work—be that a lover, partner, family member, friend, celebrity crush, or a fleeting encounter—provides a similarly fascinating insight into their practice. Work by John Currin, Nan Goldin, Rudolf Stingel, and Anna Weyant is included.
Installation view, Friends & Lovers, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, October 6, 2023–January 20, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Paul Mpagi Sepuya, © Anna Weyant, © Alessandro Teoldi, © Sung Jik Yang. Photo: Steven Probert
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Anna Weyant in
In New York, Thinking of You: Part II
May 6–June 3, 2023
FLAG Art Foundation, New York
www.flagartfoundation.org
In New York, Thinking of You is a two-part group exhibition featuring largely new or never-before-shown artworks by over two dozen female, female-identifying, and nonbinary artists. Centering on painting, the exhibition highlights a range of subjects, formal disciplines, conceptual practices, and approaches to art making. Work by Anna Weyant is included.
Anna Weyant, It’s a Heartache, 2023 © Anna Weyant
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Anna Weyant in
Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity
February 12–May 15, 2022
Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas
www.greenfamilyartfoundation.org
Celebrating the unique voices of some of the most compelling rising female artists working today, Women of Now features twenty-eight artists who synthesize memory and a sense of place as artistic tools to impart their unique identities to the world, generating a conversation about what it means to be a woman in our time. Work by Anna Weyant is included.
Anna Weyant, Maggie, 2019 © Anna Weyant