‘Memories of a place, a thought, a longing, an impression – these last a fraction of a second and it is incomprehensible to think that they might go on for days or months on end. Why should a painting contain any more time than that? It’s enough. It is more than enough for a painting to contain a day’s worth of the progression of thoughts in a mind. When we pick up an idea or a memory again, another day, it has already changed. So, that’s another painting, for it is entirely different. I want to paint for exactly as long as I can hang on to a sensation and then immediately put down the paintbrush.’
G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2022, p.43
‘Alternatingly, a couple is both speaker and listener, performer and audience. The whole loop of interaction is contained in the painting, without any need for an outside world. Related to this, there is that line from Warhol’s diaries, “the best love story is just two love birds in a cage”. […] They echo Munch’s men and women, many of whom to me seem to be variations on Adam and Eve.'
G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2022, p. 21
'I paint in a simplified flat style, in an expressive visual shorthand that relates to a variety of influences - from cartoon and emojis to miniature paintings, Matisse and Picasso, German expressionism and neo-expressionsim. Drawing is at the core of my work, and paintings are built around an initial expressive line.’
G. Weaver, ‘Grace Weaver’, in The-Art-Form, no. 6, 2022, p. 93
'All painting contains some degree of self-portraiture, especially in the case of figurative painting. That’s how I see the individual female figures in my work. They’re usually stand-ins or proxies for me, but on a psychological rather than a visual level. ‘Emotional self-portraits’ is maybe the best way to describe their relationship to me.'
G. Weaver in conversation with E. Pricco, ‘Grace Weaver: The Big Picture’, in Juxtapoz Magazine, Autumn 2018
‘These heads are painted into a thick white ground, so that with each stroke, the tint seems in danger of fading away. They just barely cohere. Maybe it’s a little like someone whispering a story breathily and hot in your ear.’
G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2022, p.21
‘These are the habits of daily life – trash going out, groceries being picked up, errands being run, these are moments in which nothing dramatic is happening, at first glance. Moments which usually fade from our memories as time passes, whereas the seemingly significant parts of life float to the surface. I am trying to look closely at moments, objects, places and interactions that seem unimportant to us because they appear so unmonumental.’
G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, 2022, p.13
'Their size reflects the limits and the reach of my body. The figures’ dimensions are exaggerated extrapolitans of my own. A step is about the length of a step. Everything is slightly larger-than-life, reflective of brushstrokes that are just slightly hyper-extended.’
G. Weaver in conversation with C. Malycha, Grace Weaver: TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, London, 2022, p. 3
’The girls in my collages… I imagine they’re all walking through a kind of oppressive heat, through glittering surroundings, uncertain, uneasy. I really think our walks and morning runs, circumscribing city centers, wandering through weird vacant lots, up hills on the edge of town – those all stick with me the most.’
G. Weaver in conversation with E. P. S. Degenhardt, Grace Weaver In Morocco, Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris; Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2023
‘In Grace Weaver’s paintings, vitality is not limited to materiality but extends to the level of imagery: Wellness, sports, and self-care routines repeatedly appear, as do social units such as families and couples. The content of the paintings is inextricable from their making. As Weaver creates these paintings, her characters themselves are in a perpetual state of becoming.’
M. Canbaz, ‘Heavy Painting: Weight and Affect, Ideals of Beauty and Social Tropes in Grace Weaver’s Painting’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 94
‘The new works, with their dark and sombre colours, are in stark contrast to her previous bright and colourful paintings. Weaver has also abandoned her distinctive contours, enclosing bodies and things alike. Nonetheless, at first glance, one can easily detect Weaver’s unique style and recurring narrative inspiration, with her female characters immersed in their daily activities.’
N. Afzali, ‘Interior Motives’, in Berlin Art Link, 18 June 2021
‘Emphasizing and dramatizing the weight and gravity of a figure makes visible the invisible – like anxiety, sadness, or self-consciousness.’
G. Weaver, in A. Cohen, ‘In Bold Figurative Paintings, Grace Weaver Captures the Mood of Her Generation’, in Artsy, 29 May 2020
‘Although there are many people doing many things in Grace Weaver’s paintings, color grabs you first. The colors have big, almost sentient personalities. From this realization, the works’ most captivating aspect goes hi-def. These paintings condense multiple dimensions into the singular picture plane. First there is a chromatic realm, which lives independent of us human beings. Then there is the realm of human activity, where color is so often used as mere decoration. Weaver’s work transports us into a third zone, wherein hues have taken over, stirring and electrifying life.’
M. Speed, ‘Marigold: Considering Grace Weaver’s Colors’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 26
‘Of all the works in the show, Intersection is perhaps the most evocative of pandemic panic. Two women – one out for a jog, the other hoisting a young child on her shoulders – eye each other warily as they pass each other crossing the street. Though they seem to studiously avoid one another, their legs appear some- how entangled by unhappy accident. Several caterpillar-shaped plumes of smoke, steam, and exhaust wend through the composition. Most straightforwardly, these shapes represent various urban air pollutants, but in the context of the pandemic Weaver also sees how they might reference 14th-15th century miasma theory, which held that diseases spread through society in concentrated clouds of poisonous air. In the context of a city contracting from the threat of contagious disease, the notions of public exposure and vulnerability raised earlier take on additional resonances.’
S. Thompson, ‘Grace Weaver: The Theater of Public Life’, James Cohan, July 2020, p. 5
‘Considering the importance of drawing for Grace Weaver’s practice, one finds fascinating parallels between her images and handwriting. Drawing gives her the ability to efficiently transmute an idea into a pictorial sketch, thus functioning as a kind of note-taking or visual brain-storming. By continuously erasing and reforming the shapes of her figures until a final pose or arrangement is found, she achieves maximum impact for each motif. These condensed motifs are often translated into paintings, taking the final composition without the procedural residue.’
M. Lin-Kröger, ‘Non-Chalance and Self-Determination: On Grace Weaver’s Daytime TV’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 132-133
‘Daytime TV belongs to a small series of paintings in which Grace Weaver turns to shoes as her subject matter. Apart from the loafers, there are black stilettos, light blue ones criss-crossed with a multi-colored diamond pattern, as well as larger-than-life checkered platforms, presented up close. These shoes already characterize certain types of people. However, they are never shown in isolation. There are always feet inside these shoes, filling them with life. Almost like psychograms, these paintings invite viewers not only to gaze at them but to actively decode them in search of the particular moods and personalities of the shoes’ wearers.
[…] In Grace Weaver’s paintings, we sense and see that all of her protagonists claim and take on active roles, manifested in every gesture from tip to painted toe. Thus, even a loafer, nonchalantly dropped, is enough to say it all.’
M. Lin-Kröger, ‘Non-Chalance and Self-Determination: On Grace Weaver’s Daytime TV’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 132–133
‘Grace Weaver builds up her paintings in numerous layers of matte oil paint. The densely colored surfaces give the pictures a certain weight, recalling the forms of painters like Philip Guston or Fernand Léger. Borrowing a term more commonly associated with music, Weaver herself calls this way of applying color “heavy painting”. In Parentheses (2019), bodies and clothes are rounded and molded. These figures indeed do appear and feel heavy, as though they are struggling against gravity to achieve uprightness. Further intensity is added and literally embedded in the painted surface with traces of brushstrokes evoking a “haptic longing to touch”. Each curve of a body in the painting is bound in by a heavy, sculpted brushstroke.’
M. Canbaz, ‘Heavy Painting: Weight and Affect, Ideals of Beauty and Social Tropes in Grace Weaver’s Painting’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 94
‘I love working with the biggest canvasses that I can. So much of what is important to me is gesture – dramatic brushstrokes and big shapes. I find that’s only really possible when the canvas is the size of my body or bigger. […] The paintings need to be as big as they are to have an impact on a physical level. Color depends so much on quantity. Even if the paintings have a politeness to the subject matter or a prettiness to the color, I want them to be confrontational in some way. Scale is one way to do that.’
G. Weaver in conversation with E. Pricco, ‘Grace Weaver: The Big Picture’, in Juxtapoz Magazine, Autumn 2018
‘Such pictures enchant us – both by their complexity and directness. Essentially, they are allegories of the now. We empathize with their characters, because we can recognize ourselves in them. Their moods and temperaments are ours, too, and tracing them is just one of the many charms of Grace Weaver’s paintings, which unify so many opposites in exciting harmony.’
A. Deiss and G. Wagenfeld-Pleister, ‘Allegories of the Now: Introducing Grace Weaver’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 9
‘Grace Weaver’s pictures are like moments in the life of a young generation and, at the same time, reflect their mood. Motifs include narrative tropes such as family, lifestyle, and recreation, but extend to the emotional dimension, with psychological tropes like self-consciousness, imposter syndrome, disillusionment, and passive aggression frequently recurring. Thus, the visual narratives are not only based on the pure application of a type of role play but extend further into the emotional realm.’
M. Canbaz, ‘Heavy Painting: Weight and Affect, Ideals of Beauty and Social Tropes in Grace Weaver’s Painting’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 95
‘Drawing is also the most direct sort of image-making, and a way to generate tons of ideas. There is no reason not to make a drawing because it’s so low stakes. That allows me to entertain the tiniest and dumbest of ideas, whether it’s someone painting her toenails or buying bodega candy or fixing her bra strap. Sometimes, though, one of these “dumb” ideas will have a magnetism or a poignancy that demands to become a painting.’
G. Weaver in conversation with E. Pricco, ‘Grace Weaver: The Big Picture’, in Juxtapoz Magazine, Autumn 2018
‘Although Weaver’s paintings are technically still, they animate life, albeit in sudden and surprising ways. Take that red shadowed lover. His face has the intensity of synthetic flavoring, even if the specific taste remains elusive. And then there’s the orange beverage, which he sucks through a straw, itself outlined in a glowing yellow-white. I want to taste that orange drink. Its fluorescence evokes tangy juice. Just like the liquid that used to flow into my own childhood gullet. In this way the painting sends synthetic sugar waves through a viewer’s gray matter. This is painting as the transfiguration of a known world into something so vivid it becomes alien.’
M. Speed, ‘Marigold: Considering Grace Weaver’s Colors’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 27
‘Grace Weaver is interested in the relationships between people and spaces and in the state of togetherness, and less so in the examination of the individual. In that sense, the paintings reflect and are embedded in a network of relationships, just as each individual person is enmeshed in a society.’
M. Canbaz, ‘Heavy Painting: Weight and Affect, Ideals of Beauty and Social Tropes in Grace Weaver’s Painting’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 95
‘In the earliest stages of a painting, I spend a lot of time working in one or two colors, figuring out the composition. I start out more in the mode of an abstract painter, concerned mostly about the geometry and rhythm of the painting. It’s kind of like piecing together a puzzle, working through trial and error until all of the shapes come together. That happens before I’m even considering facial expressions or clothing or relationships. The individual figures arise as the residue of the activity of painting.’
G. Weaver in conversation with E. Pricco, ‘Grace Weaver: The Big Picture’, in Juxtapoz Magazine, Autumn 2018
‘It’s a transfixing enigma, the way that the scale of Weaver’s hues echoes a scale of sentiment implicit in the scenes depicted. The work’s personal, social, compositional, and chromatic content are built into a polyphonic chorus. The fact that this chorus hangs together so convincingly – that it achieves an uncanny sense of coherence despite each of its elements being so autonomously lucid – is one reason that these paintings grip viewers. There is an elaborate kind of intoxication on offer here. It is made from images, chromatic experiences, and compositional arrangements. But for any person who is not a Rococo daydreamer, it is realness that catalyzes the work’s effect.’
M. Speed, ‘Marigold: Considering Grace Weaver’s Colors’, in Grace Weaver, exh. cat., Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen; Oldenburger Kunstverein, Oldenburg; Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2020, p. 28
All works: © Grace Weaver, courtesy of the artist, and Soy Capitán, Berlin
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