Grace Weaver: STEPS: Drawings | Gallery Exhibition at 291 Grand St

Grace Weaver’s charcoal drawings turn an incisive yet empathetic eye onto the self-conscious performativity and precarious footing of her contemporaries. Depicting emotive, elastic-limbed figures that drip tears into their coffee mugs and collide on bustling street-corners, her works on paper capture movement with an economy of expression to convey the interior and social narratives underlying everyday excursions in public space.

In Weaver’s drawings, psychological narratives are suggested with a subtlety of expression—through the sideways tilt of a glance, the subtle curl of a lip, or the droopy slouch of a shoulder. Her works on paper act as character-studies, enlisting playful manipulations of space and human form to reveal the charged social and cultural conditions underlying self-concept, intimacy, and individual experience.

Weaver’s drawing, which is part of her daily practice, is a study in the constant reworking of similar subjects and tableaus—pedestrians on the go, a solitary female figure bending into child’s pose—that, while rooted in observation, represent not individualized portraiture but rather a contemporary approach to genre art.