Written by Georgia Smith
01/02/2025
The nape of a woman’s neck, rendered in sublime detail. Taut yet supple skin swathed in a white bath robe. The robe draped just below the shoulder – allowing two full breasts to not so much fall as find themselves suspended in the air – a stream of light runs across a sleek mass of barely brunette hair and is found concentrated upon the ball of the shoulder. Or, of a more provocative intention: the naked legs and pelvis of a suspiciously nubile figure; three dashes of cherry red blood adorning the left calf. The young woman inexplicably suspended in midair. Another young woman: her mischievousness manifest in the bold roll of her eyes, full peach lips, lit only by the candle she holds in her left hand. A sleek monochromatic sketch of a handgun, tied with a bow. A bandaged hand, svelte fingers slipped around the stem of a wine glass, plum coated lips revealing an equine smile. The images described above, in places reminiscent of both the lacquered sensuality of Tamara de Lempicka and eerie luminescence of Edward Hopper, are Anna Weyant’s Head (2020), That’s All Folks (2024), Girl with Candlestick (2023), Drawing for Lily (Gun Study) (2021), and Loose Screw (2020).
Anna Weyant, Girl with Candlestick, 2023, Oil on canvas.
Composed by the youngest artist ever signed at gallery giant Gagosian – thirty-year-old Anna Weyant – who has been described as “wickedly savvy, unexpectedly blunt, and sometimes a bit vulgar”. Weyant has exhibited multiple times with Gagosian. Her debut, Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over closed at 980 Madison Avenue, New York on December 23, 2022. Each successive year has observed an exhibition of Weyant’s work. The Guitar Man closed at one of Gagosian’s Paris outposts, 9 rue de Castiglione, on December 22, 2023; Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves ran at Gagosian’s London Davies Street location and closed December 20 of last year. Weyant’s exhibitions with Gagosian have been supplemented by a slew of highly tasteful, prestigious commissions. The New York Metropolitan Opera commissioned a piece by Weyant to adorn the Lincoln Centre ahead of, and during, their staging of Giuseppe Verde’s La Forza Del Destino. Most recently, Weyant has reimagined the Lady Dior – the cult handbag hailing from French designer Christian Dior; named for its most iconic patron the late Princess Diana – for the ninth edition of the Dior Lady Art Project. The American edition of Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss features Weyant’s Falling Woman as it’s cover art. The original painting sold at Sotheby’s New York for $1.62 million in 2022.
Anna Weyant, Falling Woman, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Weyant’s nascent body of work is at its core sensually inclined, swelling with an adolescent moodiness: concerning itself with the “dark” and “synthetic” elements of a lifestyle, it produces an artistic mode which is “sentiment[ally]” erotic, and rich with “emotional textures”. But it is not the inevitable allure of Weyant’s images, their slick surreal depictions of female adolescence defined by what she herself sees as its “awkwardness and brutality” and attendant sense of “rebellion, soft rebellion, contained rebellion.” Nor is it the subtle pulses of Balthus or Lucien Freud that Weyant believes to form the perpetual heartbeat of her work that makes them so arresting. Not either is it the way several critics have noted the apparent genius with which her paintings blend the richness of “old-world formalism” and contemporary motifs to produce images which reflect “a modern sensibility oriented toward the youthful, the female, and the internet native.”
It is the allure of Weyant herself. A petite frame, doe eyes, an unblemished smile framed by bright blonde hair. As her friend Eileen Kelly, the subject of Weyant’s Eileen (2022), Two Eileens (2022) and Here, My Dear (2024), is perhaps allowed to suggest “she’s like a little doll”. Arriving to the 2023 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Gala in a completely sheer beaded gown, covered only by an equally sheer fur-trimmed trench coat, Weyant made it clear that it is not only her work which is in possession of “a flash of devilish energy”. Posts on Weyant’s Instagram strike a slick balance between aestheticism and cool sentimentality. Shots of her monograph, simply titled Anna Weyant, juxtapose the effortlessly chic candid in which she is seated in a dark wood-paneled room, illuminated by the light of a lamp behind the chair in which she sits, dressed in an oversized black hoodie, presumably making corrections to the canvas which would become It’s Coming from Inside the House (2024).
Anna Weyant, Its Coming from Inside the House, 2024, Oil on canvas.
In early November last year, it was announced that Weyant’s art would grace the cover of American Vogue. Her dreamlike rendering of model Kaia Gerber, daughter of eighties supermodel Cindy Crawford, appears to embody something about the unique alchemy of her work. The sense of sophistication Weyant emits, but above all her obvious beauty, gives something (albeit something untraceable) to the compositional tightness of her images. Their sensuality made manifest through her fingers contact with the paintbrush. Her portrait of Gerber sees the young model stare ponderously from a window, a positioning evocative of the tale of sleeping beauty. A fairytale semantics too surround Weyant. Carrie Battan’s profile of Weyant for the February 2023 issue of British GQ was published as Anna’s Adventures in Wonderland. There are elements of Weyant’s biography which are undeniably fanciful: her meteoric rise to success, the backdrop of metropolitan New York, soaring sales figures, and art media ubiquity.
Since 2021, Weyant had been in a relationship with Gagosian founder, Larry Gagosian – the famed art dealer is fifty years Weyant’s senior. Their relationship ended in 2023. I was to argue what I perceived to be the deeply distasteful, thoroughly sexist, and genuinely insipid way speculation about Weyant’s relationship precedes critical interpretation of her art (I hope my deliberate choice in structure reflects this). While this stands true, it’s predicated on one implicit assumption – that the key to decoding Weyant’s art is rooted within her sex. To understand Weyant’s work fully is to understand that there is something operative about her beauty. Mischievousness darts through the erotic sensibility of her emergent oeuvre, in which her beauty suffuses with ruminative imaginings of the condition of female adolescence, to produce an affective body of work which is both deeply sentimental and sybaritic. That I should have to clarify that this is not to suggest that Weyant’s only currency is her physicality, or that her works do not stand testament to her technical genius alone, reflects the cultural crisis in which beauty is defined too rigidly. In which beauty can only be seen as a form of objectification, a reduction to something lesser than, and not as evidence of an aesthetic orbit – produced in a works composition, through its points of reference, and by the creator’s relationship to it – which is rich with the potential for moments of empathy, eroticism, fear, and delight.
Bibliography
n.d. “Anna Weyant .” Gagosian. Accessed January 19, 2025. https://gagosian.com/artists/anna-weyant/.
Battan, Carrie. 2024. “How Anna Weyant Became The Most Talked About Painter In The Art World.” GQ. January 25. Accessed January 19, 2025. https://www.gq.com/story/anna-weyant-profile.
Crow, Kelly. 2022. “Three Years Ago, Her Art Sold for $400 at the Beach. Now It Fetches Up To $1.6 Million at Auction.” The Wall Street Journal. June 18. Accessed January 19, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/articles/anna-weyant-paintings-larry-gagosian-11655482365.
Sporn, Stephanie. 2022. “Anna Weyant’s Botticelli-esque Paintings Are Taking the Art Market by Storm.” Harper’s Bazaar. November 4. Accessed January 19, 2025. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a41867684/anna-weyants-boticelli-esque-paintings-are-taking-the-art-market-by-storm/.
Featured Image Credit: Anna Weyant, Head, 2020, Oil on canvas, https://gagosian.com/artists/anna-weyant/. .
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