In her paintings and works on paper, Grace Weaver (b. 1989) explores the painterly possibilities of the human form. Bodies, faces, furniture and objects are arranged in concise compositions of line, colour and shape, in which a curve might describe a shoulder, a swoop of hair or the contour of a vessel, binding the paintings in visual rhyme. Weaver condenses familiar forms into a highly personal vocabulary of shapes and symbols which concentrate her subjects’ emotional charge. Finding affinities between our contemporary world and far-flung points in art history, the artist reveals a persistent interest in the ever-evolving language of the face and figure across time and geography. Her sources range from Neolithic sculpture to Cranach, from Minoan frescoes to Oskar Schlemmer, reflecting a maximalist approach that echoes the literary magpie-ism of James Joyce.
Weaver’s motifs, which span mothers, couples, mourners, female nudes and flowers, take the figure as a point of departure for an exploration of the materials and methods of painting. Working in oil, acrylic and watercolour, Weaver brings chroma and brushwork together in an all-over, wet-into-wet approach. Because of the intense immediacy of her process, brushstrokes become a catalogue of time, each stroke like a step in Weaver’s painterly choreography. Despite their often monumental scale, her works retain a sense of intimacy through their insistence on mark-making. The resulting images are at once highly composed and vividly alive: figures held in a state between representation and abstraction, presentness and archetype.
‘I think that painting always has this paradox of making eternal something totally temporary. To me, that’s a kind of rare thing in the world […]. I think that painting has this very special ability to freeze one feeling and one very discrete amount of time forever.’
G. Weaver, ‘Eternity Captured in a Gesture’, Louisiana Channel, May 2025.
