Galerie Max Hetzler, London, is happy to current Flowers, an exhibition of recent work by Grace Weaver. That is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, and her second within the London area.
Painted in 2024 in Rangsdorf, Germany, Weaver’s newest physique of sixteen large-scale canvases takes as its point of interest some of the enduring motifs of artwork historical past: the flower. Rendered in acrylic on canvas, a medium shift for the artist, the ‘Flower Work’ stand as each a counterpoint and continuation of Weaver’s oil work and watercolours of the human topic. Certainly, whereas spectacular in dimension, the work are imbued with a profound intimacy. Upright, drooping, or entwined in a tangle of stems, the brightly colored flowers seem extremely charged, as if resonating with a full spectrum of emotion.
In her portray observe, Weaver employs a particular means of layering. These new works aren’t any exception: every floor contains many coats of thinned matte acrylic paint, closely watered down in order to gradual the drying course of and encourage a way of fluidity. Working straight on the ground, as within the custom of Summary Expressionism, Weaver applies swathes of acrylic paint to her canvases with giant, industrial-scale brushes affixed to broom handles. This shut proximity to the works permits Weaver to color extra abstractly. Free of the confines of content material and orientation, the main target lies on color, gesture and kind. ‘I don’t see the ultimate composition till the tip,’ she notes. ‘It’s a means of briefly undermining my very own maintain on the image.’2 Her strategy of portray wet-into-wet produces tactile and translucent surfaces marked with haptic brushstrokes and drip marks. Harnessing a component of probability, the colors bleed into each other at instances, taking over the qualities of watercolour.
The sequence is split into gentle and darkish work, every equally executed. For the lighter works, Weaver applies a closing base layer of black, adopted by a thinner layer of semi-translucent acrylic in white, cream or beige. Within the black work, a light-weight opaque layer of blue or white is roofed with a skinny, clear wash of black in lengthy overlapping strokes. The colors seem by the cracks like gentle, with layered markings and brushstrokes rendered seen like a palimpsest. Lastly, the flowers are added, every broad, sweeping stem dictated by the artist’s arm span; every head ablaze in vibrant hues of yellow, purple, pink, pink, white and blue. ‘I start one-by-one laying in flowers,’ Weaver explains, ‘typically erasing as I’m going, stem after which bloom, stem after which bloom. Somewhat like a dance.’3
Weaver has beforehand described her figurative works as ‘monumental-scale work of non-monumental moments, ambivalent feelings, extraordinary situations…’4 Wilting or alert, bending or blooming, the flowers conjure an identical sense of the sweetness discovered within the quiet mundanity of life. Going through in direction of or away from each other, they seem at instances solitary, at others linked, as if performing the rituals of human interplay. The flowers are composed from a line for stem and strokes for petals, providing a reductive and archetypal model of the motif that teeters in direction of abstraction. One of many artist’s influences for this sequence was grocery retailer tulips, that not-quite common however frequent commodity marking the beginning of spring. Image of hope everlasting, the altering of the seasons, low-cost and cheerful, marred with a type of drooping pathos. Thus intimating a fancy and contradictory vary of temper, vitality and posture, the flowers current a renewed and stripped again exploration into probably the most poignant and pervasive themes of Weaver’s observe.