Galerie Max Hetzler, London, is pleased to present Plaids, an exhibition of new watercolour on paper compositions by Grace Weaver. This is the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, and her third in the London space.
Painted in 2026 during an extended stay in Los Angeles, Weaver’s new body of abstract and figurative works draws on the rhythmic, patterned textiles of checks, tartans and plaids. Approaching painting as a form of drawing, with line laid down in fluid, sweeping brushstrokes, the ‘Plaids’ continue Weaver’s ongoing concern with colour, gesture, geometry and line. The artist explains: ‘if line has to do with mapping thought, then these are small bundles of thoughts, moments in time transcribed or translated into linear form’. Exploring vibrant combinations of colour, Weaver likens the painting of these works to the process of weaving itself, with accumulating bands of paint mirroring the methodical warp and weft of woven thread.
In her cycle of figurative plaid-works, Weaver references ancient and iconographic forms of portraiture. The formal strictness of the plaid motif is mirrored by the postures of the figures who, shown frontally or in near profile, are inspired by iconic and emblematic depictions of the human form. Weaver draws on Celtic carved stone heads as well as Minoan and Mesopotamian art, particularly images of Ishtar – the goddess of war and love – and decorative figuration found in cylinder seals from the Akkadian period (2350–2150 BCE). This figurative restraint is juxtaposed with richly patterned clothing and vivid plaid backgrounds, enveloping each in gestural line and colour. ‘Emotion can be contained in the mark-making itself’, the artist notes.
Across the ‘Plaids’, formal rigidity is set in tension with the mercurial fluidity of watercolour. Painting wet-into-wet onto large, soaked sheets placed directly on the floor, Weaver describes how ‘each mark becomes an index of the body’. Bold lines of colour overlay and interact as rivulets of paint pool, bleed and bloom across the surface of the paper, seeping into its fibres. Attentive to the idiosyncrasies of particular pigments, whereby their varying densities impact mark making, Weaver describes how ‘the lines interfere with each other in that short window of drying time, bleeding together, squeezing or pushing one another out of the way, so that the final image has the sensation of breathing or pulsing’. Once dry, the implied chronology of ‘woven’ paint – downstrokes intersected with horizontal bands of pigment – collapses into the work’s unified painterly surface. In this way the ‘Plaids’ carry an inflection of duration, with each work containing the moment of its making.
Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) lives and works between New York and Berlin. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in international institutions including Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (2026); Neues Museum Nürnberg; Yuz Museum, Shanghai (both 2023–2024); Oldenburger Kunstverein; Kunstpalais Erlangen (both 2019); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2017); and Dakshina Chitra, Chennai (2012). Weaver’s works are in the collections of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk; Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti; Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf; Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main; and Yuz Foundation, among others.
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