Grace Weaver

b. 1989 

Grace Weaver paints large-scale acrylic and oil canvases of young, lively figures in a vibrant palette of radiant, luminous, and flattened colors. These people are not anatomically correct but rather become weird abstractions to show the estrangement they have from their own bodies. For Weaver, the Baroque twisting of their bodies creates a multiplicity of moments in one pose. 

Born in Burlington, Vermont Weaver assumed that like her parents she would be a university professor. However after a waiting course in her sophomore year of college she graduated with a B.A. in studio art from UVM in 2011. She earned her M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 and moved to Brooklyn, New York where she lives and works with her husband who builds the stretchers for her canvases with his grandfather.

Weaver paints long-limbed, rounded figures, mostly of women, in vivid colors of pink and red. She lays down a single color to create a shape and then traces its border several times using a deeper hue to soften the inner edge that glows. She delineates the forms of her figures through these heavily articulated outlines with softer interior shading. 

Her references are particular to her generation and to the New York City milieu. She has chosen not to paint the momentous events of life but rather the mundane, everyday moments of normal activities, the “nuggets of memory,” those moments that linger. Her earlier works place her figures in domestic scenes, showing people working in kitchens, looking in mirrors, putting on makeup, talking on phones, or typing on laptops.

In later works Weaver places her characters out of the home in public spaces, such as in busy city streets or subways. Her characters are in dynamic action running in high heels with skirts flying in a state of exuberance. Sidewalks serve as a stage with drama derived from the public settings. Her characters are onstage in the “theater of public life” often vulnerable and exposed to the prying eyes of the male gaze as women know they are being watched. 

There is a shift to heaviness and to the gravity of bodies in large-scale works.  Her figures are larger-than-life. Bodies are colliding on street-corners or falling down as in “Step” and “Confrontation.” Her visual iconography suggests some kind of degradation or humiliation of women. Their faces are not happy but show stress. The tears on their faces and the drips of their coffee arc upwards. The jagged edges on “Transfer” shows the harshness of city life. Her 2020 “Choker” has a thin black band constricting a woman’s neck. In another work, a fallen woman crawls on her hands and knees in a neon-pink dress. 

Solo exhibitions in the U.S. in New York and Vermont; Germany, Scotland, China, France, and India. Solo exhibitions at two German institutions, Kunstpalais Erlangen and Oldenburger Kunstverein.

Her work is in the permanent collections of France’s  FRAC des Pays de la Loire; Shanghai’s Yuz Museum; Denmark’s ARoS  Art Museum; and the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art.

More here.