Anna Weyant

The hapless subjects of Anna Weyant’s indelible paintings and drawings are recurrently tested by everyday circumstances, weathering what the artist has described as “low-stakes trauma.” In these precisely rendered scenes, figures—most often young and female—find themselves embroiled in tragicomic narratives with an ironic twinge, offering a dreamlike insight into the capacity of popular culture and social convention to manufacture and distort gestures, rituals, and signifiers of femininity. But far from presenting her protagonists as merely symbolic, Weyant remains sensitive to their human idiosyncrasies and contradictions, picturing characters who are endearing, mysterious, and wholly themselves. In her crystalline still-life compositions, meanwhile, everyday objects adopt an uncanny, portentous air.

Weyant was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1995. After earning a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, she relocated to New York and 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—modeled after one that she owned as a child—and its young female inhabitants. A later series deconstructs the appearance of American suburbia in Lifetime’s made-for-television movies, casting it as a surreal realm in which violence and disaster lurk just beneath the surface. In her still lifes, Weyant depicts fruit, flowers, and other items in a similarly unsettling light; Lily (2021), for example, juxtaposes the titular bloom with a revolver bound in gold ribbon.

In these and other works, Weyant employs a somber, muted palette of deep greens, dusty pinks, and deep black. She also draws on art historical and present-day influences, from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to twentieth-century mavericks like Balthus to contemporary painters Jennifer Packer and Ellen Berkenblit. As revealed in her first solo institutional exhibition, at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2025), where her paintings were placed in dialogue with the museum’s collection, Weyant displays a deep understanding and appreciation of her work’s roots and parallels while eliciting an immediate and emotional response.