“I like it when there's something that's not quite right in the image, something that doesn't fit.”
—Anna WeyantTaking variations in light and tone to their natural extremities - a mise en scène that as true-to-life as uncanny - Anna Weyant through her impossibly smooth, glossed surfaces re-invigorates the tradition of portrait painting to create modern masters of the present day. Bathing the sitter in dramatic lighting with concise, elegant movements of the brush, Weyant handles paint with a tenebrist virtuosity, creating a composition in So Bored shrouded with intrigue and mystery. Painted in 2019, the same year of her first, breakthrough solo exhibition Welcome to the Dollhouse at 56 Henry in New York, Weyant’s sitters are sculptural, doll-like and static. Set in an interior yet removed from place, it is within these midnight spaces that Weyant plays with the unseen and seen, capturing the subtly of human expression through her muted tones and dramatic chiaroscuro: what lies beyond the picture frame that captures the sitter’s gaze? Maintaining robust dialogues with Dutch Golden Age and Baroque painters such as Gerrit van Honthorst, Frans Hals and Caravaggio, Weyant through her artificially lit, unsettling scenes captures the theatricality and atmospheres of liminal moments. It is between the lines of these untold narratives – the before and after – that the viewer observes and feels observed in a world that remains just out of reach.

 

 

The Great Women Artists Podcast: Anna Weyant

 

Collector’s Digest

      

• Born in 1995 in Calgary, Canada, Anna Weyant is among the most successful female artists painting today. Living and working in the solitude of her New York studio, usually under the cover of night, Weyant’s sitters emerge from life, photography and her imagination.
• The youngest artist to be represented by Gagosian internationally, joining the program at twenty-seven, after two critically acclaimed exhibitions with the gallery’s satellites in New York (2022) and in Paris (2023), Weyant’s third solo exhibition with Gagosian, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?, is set to open in London on the 8th October 2024.
• Since Weyant’s auction debut at Phillips New York in June 2021, Weyant’s painting Buffett II, sold for US$730,800 (premium) in May 2022, more than seven times its low estimate.