Anna Weyant Biography
Born in 1995 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, she is one of the most talented artists of her generation - Thanks to Larry Gagosian, great talent discoverer she is taking an important place among the great creators of our time.
Lives and works in New York, NY. - https://gagosian.com/
About Anna Weyant
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.
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2017 Rhode Island School of Design, B.F.A., Providence, RI Solo Exhibitions: 2022 Splinter, Blum & Poe, Tokyo, JP 2021 Anna Weyant: Drawings, Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown, MA Loose Screw, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA 2019 Welcome to the Dollhouse, 56 Henry, New York, NY Group Exhibitions: 2022 Women of Now, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA 2021 North by Northeast, Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY and I will wear you in my heart of heart, Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY 2020 Sympathetic Magic, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA Life Still, C L E A R I N G, New York, NY Allegory of Painting, Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong Sit Still, Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY Intimate Companions, Mary Heaton Vorse House, Provincetown, MA
Body in Motion, Stems Gallery, Brussels, Belgium HUMANMAKES, Recharge Foundation, Singapore 2019 For Mario, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, NY HISTORICITY, Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA Figurative Approaches, East End Culture Club, Southampton, NY The Views, Fisher Parrish Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2018 Of Purism, Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, FL 2017 Circles Without Breaks, Local Projects, Long Island City, NY |
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About Larry Gagosian |
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Known for always encouraging his artists’ ambitions, Mr. Gagosian has fostered the careers of many of the most world-renowned artists working today. Working across the contemporary and modern eras, he represents living artists such as Georg Baselitz, John Currin, Rachel Feinstein, Urs Fischer, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Katharina Grosse, Mark Grotjahn, Jennifer Guidi, Andreas Gursky, Hao Liang, Michael Heizer, Damien Hirst, Jia Aili, Titus Kaphar, Anselm Kiefer, Rick Lowe, Vera Lutter, Sally Mann, Brice Marden, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Nancy Rubins, Ed Ruscha, Taryn Simon, Rudolf Stingel, Sarah Sze, Adriana Varejão, Jeff Wall, Mary Weatherford, Rachel Whiteread, and Jonas Wood, as well as masters of design Frank Gehry and Marc Newson. The gallery’s exhibitions present a broad range of work—from Jenny Saville’s painterly depictions of the human form to Richard Serra’s iconic monumental steel sculptures and drawings. Gagosian has prepared and presented unparalleled museum-quality exhibitions of works by historical artists such as Arakawa, Diane Arbus, Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Walter De Maria, Lucio Fontana, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Howard Hodgkin, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Piero Manzoni, Agnes Martin, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Zao Wou-Ki, among others. A series of groundbreaking Picasso surveys curated by scholar John Richardson was attended by hundreds of thousands of visitors in New York and London. In 2019, Mr. Gagosian curated an exhibition featuring Picasso masterpieces as a tribute to Richardson following his death. A benefactor of museums and arts organizations worldwide, Mr. Gagosian has provided significant support to a variety of institutions and artists’ projects. In 2019 he organized an exhibition of works donated by artists to help raise funds for the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris after the devastating fire at the cathedral. Following his support of the first two (RED) Auctions, in 2018 Mr. Gagosian partnered with Bono’s (RED) and Sotheby’s to present the third (RED) Auction to benefit the global fight against AIDS. He was instrumental in presenting the magnificent Ceiling by Cy Twombly in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, a commissioned permanent installation unveiled to the public in 2010. An industry innovator, Mr. Gagosian was an early investor in Artsy, the online platform for collecting and discovering art. Mr. Gagosian is frequently recognized for his contributions to the fields of contemporary and modern art. He has received the Peabody Award as a producer of American Masters: Andy Warhol, A Documentary Film (2006); the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur from the French government (2010), after which he was appointed to l’ordre national du Mérite (2015); the Academy Medal from the American Academy in Rome (2010); and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (2018). In 2017, Forbes magazine named him one of the “100 Greatest Living Business Minds.” Mr. Gagosian has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, since 2013; the Getty President’s International Council since 2019; (RED)’s Advisory Board since 2019; and Carnegie Hall’s Board of Trustees since 2020. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in English literature. |
Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery for modern and contemporary art in 1980 in Los Angeles. Today, Gagosian employs more than three hundred people, and has nineteen exhibition spaces across the United States, Europe, and Asia designed by acclaimed architects. The gallery’s initiatives include innovative online viewing rooms coinciding with major art fairs, featuring transparent and comprehensive market analysis; a publishing arm that produces scholarly exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, catalogues raisonnés, and the Gagosian Quarterly magazine; as well as distinctive retail shops.
