Anna Weyant’s Uncanny Paintings Breathe New Life into Female Portraiture

Anna Weyant’s paintings of women are at once delightful and yet strangely grotesque due to the artist’s emphasis on voluptuous bodies and distorted facial expressions. Her paintings conjure figures reminiscent of ourselves but with an uncanny quality.

In the 1980 book The Powers of Horror, scholar Julia Kristeva described abjection as simultaneously alien to us yet strangely familiar—not unlike a monster or a human corpse, which can be identified as both an individual as well as something removed from us. Weyant’s paintings of abjection invite new examinations of femininity within the historical media landscape that overemphasizes breasts and curves. Engaging with this iconography, she at once subverts it through characters that exist in surreal and uncanny environments.

The 27-year-old painter is fast emerging as a top talent in the art world. Born in Calgary, Canada, and currently based in New York, Weyant received her BFA in painting from the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design and a degree from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Her painterly style is a modern twist on the Baroque tradition, following Dutch masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, and Judith Leysterwith a dash of influence from 20th-century artists like Balthus and John Currin.

Weyant closes an extraordinary year with her solo exhibition “Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over” at Gagosian, which announced representation of the artist this past May. Separate from this achievement, her work made a gargantuan splash on the secondary market across the three major auction houses Phillips, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s during this year’s spring auctions in New York. At Sotheby’s “The Now” sale, her 2020 painting Falling Woman sold for $1.6 million, eight times its high estimate of $200,000.

“Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over,” on view through December 23rd, plays with the notion of the double. Represented across Weyant’s paintings, the multiplication of her figures invites a sense of strangeness as half of the pair grimaces while the other smiles. These doubles—featured in loose clothing to display their often voluptuous figures—trouble the image and are reminiscent of the peculiarities of femininity that bleed into monstrosity. Here, the horror is not a fanged creature, but is simply rather what lurks beneath a “perfect” surface that creates a sense of abjection from the self.

Take the striking painting Venus (2022), which features two women of color with similar features, rendered in vivid browns. With one figure facing towards the viewer and the other looking away, this work, like the painting Two Eileens (2022), uses the motif of doubling to play with familiarity and oddity. We are left to examine whether the depicted characters are twins or perhaps the same individual existing at different points in time, brought together through the power of painting. Not unlike Jasper Johns’s use of the double across his oeuvre, Weyant distorts what is recognizable about a body and severs one’s sense of self.

Featuring domestic settings in a proscenium presentation, the Gagosian exhibition captures the intimacy of Weyant’s work. In the melancholic yet adoring still life It Must Have Been Love (2022), a dining table becomes a space for wilting and blooming flowers. The disquiet nature of the painting is heightened by the sense that it is the only living thing around, not unlike the still lifes of the Dutch tradition. Weyant’s contemporary return to this moment reminds us of how unfamiliar or unaccustomed we have become with stillness in today’s technological age.

The strangeness of Weyant’s domestic settings can partially be explained by the environment in which the artist produces her work: her living room, which she converted into a studio over the past year. “One of the paintings was too large to be stretched in my space,” she told Artsy, “so I hung the raw canvas on the wall and let the bottom roll onto the floor. That’s how I worked on it.”

Weyant’s apartment studio contextualizes the privacy that often shrouds her work, while the act of painting allows her to step outside of herself to change or manipulate that intimacy. “I think we are most sensitive to, or most protective of, the parts of ourselves that we try to hide, the places where we feel shame—maybe in rage, grief, loss of control,” she said. “There’s an intimacy, a tenderness or delicacy, in where we are our most monstrous.”