Mark Twain said something about humor being “tragedy plus time.” If there’s humor in my work, it probably goes hand in hand with some sort of weird misery.
—Anna Weyant
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Anna Weyant in New York. This is her first exhibition with the gallery, which announced its representation of the artist in May.
Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over features seven new paintings along with ten new drawings. The exhibition, which sees Weyant further develop the aesthetics and themes of her previous work, takes its title from a song by Lenny Kravitz—which in turn repeats Yogi Berra’s aphorism—and riffs in self-aware fashion on popular expectations of a young artist’s career trajectory. Many of the exhibited portraits depict the same figure in two slightly different poses, suggesting subtly divergent aspects of the same persona and making reference to the biblical doubled image. The paintings hang on a lush green velvet backdrop, supplied by design house F. Schumacher & Co., which resonates with the images’ hint of camp theatricality.
Weyant’s precisely rendered figures often find themselves embroiled in tragicomic narratives, while her everyday objects adopt an eerie, portentous air. In both cases, she employs a keen ironic wit to evoke myriad idiosyncrasies and contradictions. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary influences, Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over examines aspects of an American milieu and media landscape, the subjects of which are displayed with an exactitude and intensity that is at once oneiric and all-too-real.
