Grace Weaver: In Morocco

In her paintings and drawings, Grace Weaver (b. 1989) investigates the mundanities of modernity. Her subjects encompass the feminine experience, the urban landscape, and the ordinary objects that emblematise 21st century life – from iPhones and laptops to trash-bags and grocery-store tulips. Across various mediums, and often at massive scale, Weaver’s work at once confronts and relates to the viewer. Her compositions are made with a consciousness for the procedure of painting itself: whether in watercolour, oil or acrylic, she develops a unique choreography of chroma and brushwork, resulting in works that disclose an all-over, wet-into-wet, coming together of the surface.

Weaver’s work abounds with art historical and literary references – from Henri Matisse to Georg Baselitz, Marcel Proust to Robert Walser. Her recent ‘Flower Paintings’ are pared-back compositions of line and shape, harmonising transparent layers with energetic mark-making. Whether upright, drooping, or entwined, the flowers seem to suggest a complex spectrum of emotion. As in all of Weaver’s work, they propose the act of painting as one of both performance and introspection.

‘The paintings are very close and enmeshed in my life. There’s no place for retroactive reflection as such, while painting. Better to act and record instantly. I don’t step back much, when a painting is coming along. Fussiness and delicate revisions are to be avoided. Enough of life is already characterized by self-doubt, over-thinking and muddling words … Painting is a place of directness.’

G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, exh. cat., London: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2022, p. 43