Anna Weyant: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?
Gagosian Gallery, Davies Street, London
October 8–December 20, 2024
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves marks Anna Weyant’s first art exhibition in London. I was eager to see her work in person after hearing about her extensively in the media. However, beyond the headlines surrounding her private life, Weyant’s paintings stand out for their undeniable technical mastery and profound engagement with art history. Notably, she is the youngest artist to be represented globally by Gagosian Gallery.
In her latest works, Anna Weyant blends autobiographical elements with symbolic wit, moody atmospheres, and the refined techniques that defined her earlier exhibitions: Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over (2022, Gagosian New York) and The Guitar Man (2023, Gagosian Paris).
Born in Calgary, Canada, and now based in New York, Weyant earned a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and spent seven months at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. She has credited the city’s sepia-toned terrain as a key influence on her signature muted palette.
Drawing inspiration from the elegance of Flemish portraiture and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, Anna Weyant’s paintings are both visually arresting and deeply thought-provoking. They meticulously adhere to Western aesthetic traditions of beauty and “good painting,” executed with remarkable precision, while also introducing uncanny elements that challenge these ideals.
It was interesting to see how her painterly style bridges the Baroque tradition of the Dutch Masters with modern influences, including 20th-century artists such as Balthus and John Currin, whom she cites as pivotal in her journey towards figurative painting.
Her figures, rendered in sombre tones, inhabit dreamlike spaces, revealing concealed inner struggles beneath their doll-like appearances. This tension aligns with the exhibition’s title, which alludes to fairy tales and the challenges of entering the contemporary art world.
In Girl in Window (2024), a vine’s heart-shaped leaf shields the subject’s breast, recalling fig leaves on classical statues. Such moments of exposure and concealment echo themes from her earlier works, like the eerie dollhouse of House Exterior (2023). Weyant described this show as her hardest yet, noting its more sombre tone compared to past exhibitions.
In It’s Coming from Inside the House, a seated figure hides behind a large, blank newspaper, transforming its reader into an unavailable and enigmatic presence. Meanwhile, Here, My Dear features a framed portrait of a woman glancing over her left shoulder, with light from a window illuminating the wall where the portrait rests. The off-kilter positioning of the portrait adds a sense of tension and ambiguity, hinting at an ongoing re-evaluation of identity and role.
Still lifes, though less popular than her portraits, add another dimension to her work. I particularly enjoyed Encore, where a bouquet of flowers wrapped in brown paper lies discarded. Inspired by Eminem’s Encore/Curtains Down, it symbolises the end of a performance and moving on.
My favourite painting in the exhibition was Geraldine (2024), displayed alone in the final room of the gallery. It depicts a woman’s face obscured by a flower pot. I found the mystery in this piece captivating, and the execution of the white fabric in her dress reminded me of the whites in Zurbarán’s monastic tunics. It struck me as a perfect painting for a “trophy wife,” where the woman’s identity is entirely effaced.
Weyant’s enigmatic subjects keep viewers engaged, balancing sensuality, dark humour, and technical prowess. Her blend of old-world formalism—using chiaroscuro to deepen mood and mystery, muted colour palettes, and the rich, dark backgrounds reminiscent of Dutch Masters’ portraits—with a contemporary sensibility attuned to youth, femininity, and internet culture.
Read Anna Weyant’s interview in the December 2024 issue of Vogue.
Entrance to the exhibition: Free.
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