Anna Weyant's Meteoric Rise and Gagosian Solo Show

Anna Weyant (b. 1995, Calgary) held her first solo exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York in late 2022, titled 'Baby, It Ain't Over Till It's Over', which became a landmark for the gallery in early 2023. The show featured seven new paintings and ten new drawings at the Madison Avenue location. Weyant's career has skyrocketed since 2018, when her painting 'Reposing V' went viral after being shown at Nina Johnson in Miami. She subsequently achieved auction records over $1 million at Sotheby's in May 2022 and Christie's in November 2022, leading to her representation by Larry Gagosian. Her work evolves from Manet's Olympia in a contemporary context to pieces like 'Two Eileens' (2022), which juxtaposes female dominance with a dreamy, ironic quality. Weyant draws inspiration from Baroque art, John Currin, Will Cotton, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Flora Yukhnovich, and Otto Dix. Writer Emma Cline contributed an essay to Gagosian Quarterly, describing Weyant's paintings as suspended between fairy tale and dreamlike precipice. The exhibition includes works such as 'Sophie' (2022), which references Fernando Botero and Francis Bacon, and 'It Must Have Been Love' (2022), which creates unease through familiar objects. Weyant's style combines formal artifice, surrealism, and grotesque exploration, with deep black backgrounds and natural light giving figures a hybrid quality between living matter and porcelain dolls.