Grace Weaver’s paintings are vibrant investigations of the life and times of her generation. Weaver paints an atmospheric and accessible world that she describes as “halfway between reality and fable.” Making use of a bright and at times jarring palette, she produces compositions that vibrate with energy and tension, bordering on “too-much-ness.” Within the discourse of painting, Weaver’s ambition is to contribute a voice that fuses art historical and pop cultural references into a visual language that is emphatically feminine, engaging in the aesthetics of cuteness, whimsy, and girliness.
Emotive figures with Mannerist proportions populate Weaver’s large-scale spiraling compositions with complicated psychological narrative. Most of the long-limbed, bendy people that stretch across Weaver’s canvases are captured in fleeting emotional states – caught with a forced smile, a self-conscious glance, or a passive aggressive scowl. This sense of observation – what is means to observe others, or the tangible effects of being observed – serves as a key subject matter in Weaver’s paintings.
Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, NY; Burlington, VT; Berlin and Reutlingen in Germany, Glasgow, Scotland; and Chennai, India, and is featured in the collections of FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France and ARoS Museum, Aarhus, Denmark. Weaver lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.