Gagosian is pleased to announce The Guitar Man, an exhibition by Anna Weyant opening on October 18, 2023, at 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris. This is the New York–based artist’s European solo debut and follows her first presentation with the gallery, Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over, at Gagosian, New York, in 2022. Named for a song by Los Angeles soft rock band Bread, The Guitar Man features new figure and still-life paintings inspired by classics of American pop culture including The Addams Family, Clue, Looney Tunes, and Playboy. In these striking images, Weyant develops further the dark aesthetic and haunting undercurrent of her previous work.
The paintings on view in Paris build on the motif of the dollhouse that Weyant has been exploring since her earliest work. In preparing The Guitar Man, she constructed a new, exquisite physical example reminiscent of the iconic Bates family house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The artist mined this structure for inspiration—House Exterior (2023) depicts it head-on—and used it as a platform for experimentation with lighting design. The jewel-box scale of the gallery space at rue de Castiglione also resonates with the dollhouse’s claustrophobic aura, evoking the kinds of childhood memories that linger into adulthood.
The eerie, portentous air of the dollhouse form permeates all of Weyant’s works, whether portraits, figures, or still-life compositions, resonating with images that undercut their subjects’ attempts at composure with moments of conscious awkwardness, hinting at mild but pervasive anxiety and the manipulative influence of unseen—perhaps, here, directorial—hands. Weyant’s subjects reject the impulse to violent reaction, however, in favor of quiet, introspective refusal. In her precisely rendered still lifes, meanwhile, she lends everyday objects an unsettling air.
