John Elderfield

Anna Weyant

Anna Weyant is the first monograph published by Gagosian that is devoted to the New York-based artist best-known for her precisely rendered figures with their creamy curves and soft beauty, which simmer with the tensions between feminine sexuality and purity, tragedy, and comedy. With a dark sense of humor, Weyant unpicks the tropes and traditions of art historical representation, interrupting masculine expectations to often absurd and excruciating effect. Particularly drawn to the uncertainties of adolescence, the artist captures young females in situations of intimate weirdness and catastrophe. The resonance of art history and the effect of doubling are topics discussed in essays by both John Elderfield and Yvonne Owens. Elderfield explores the meaning of the uncanny in film, painting, and sculpture, examining the strangeness of familiarity, and the difference between a real figure and a porcelain doll or an automaton. Owens highlights the pictorial devices reimagined by Weyant, including the still life and seductive symbols of vanitas and memento mori. Naomi Fry describes the potential violence of the double and the menace of everyday objects in Weyant s world, which she compares to a velvet-lined jewel box softly sealed shut. With wry reference to pop culture, Fry asserts the subtle differences and multiple viewpoints that reveal the painter s virtuosity and the fullness of female experience. In a conversation between Weyant and Edward Steed, the artist and the acclaimed cartoonist for the New Yorker discuss the awkwardness of fame, the sweet spot of comedy, and the indescribable nature of a great work of art.