Beauty in Suspense

With her mesmerising canvases, charged with irony and dark humour, young Canadian artist Anna Weyant is capturing collectors and plaudits alike with works taking up prime spots in the homes of Wendi Murdoch and Venus Williams. Her eerie still lives, and portraits recall the hand of John Currin, and the Dutch Old Masters with their soft velvety textures, exquisite lines and neutral chalky colour palette. Her seemingly serene compositions are undercut and offset with drama, feelings of anxiety and disquiet.

Her first London solo show entitled “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” follows threads developed in “Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over,” her 2022 Gagosian debut in New York, and “The Guitar Man,” her 2023 debut in Paris. The bijou exhibition – just seven works - includes Girl in Window, 2024 that sees a sculpted torso in a window shielded by a fancy Roman blind with one nipple covered by a vine leaf recalling Johanna da Costa’s masterpiece. In It’s Coming from inside the House, a seated figure hides behind a large, blank newspaper as if time and the news had become erased. Here, My Dear incorporates an inverted framed portrait of a woman glancing over her left shoulder, leaning against a wall with one solo nail left hanging. A painting of an adolescent girl, So Bored (2019), exceeded its top estimate to sell for £266,700 at Phillips’ during Frieze Week.

Born in 1995, Weyant, earned 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—modelled after one that she owned as a child—and its young female inhabitants. Her relationship (now ended) with Larry Gagosian shot her into the limelight, yet she remains humble about her starry ascent from her first showing at the influential 56 Henry Gallery in downtown New York. Weyant poignantly surfaces transitions from adolescence to womanhood and explores sexuality through a tender gaze magically drawing warm humour and empathy from the viewer who are IN on the knowing references. As many a visitor to Gagosian concluded, ‘I’d like one on my wall.’