Grace Weaver: 11 Women

Gallery Exhibition at 52 Walker Street | 18 November - 18 December 2021

  • James Cohan is pleased to present 11 Women, an exhibition of new paintings by Grace Weaver, on view from November 18 through December 18, 2021 at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location. 

    For her third exhibition at James Cohan, Weaver has created eleven oil paintings of monumentally-scaled women. Expressively rendered, the figures are arrested mid-stride as they navigate the hazards of city streets, their dynamic limbs painted in pink against asphalt grounds. At once heroic and awkward, sturdy yet precarious, brutal but tender, her subjects contend with what it is to be a woman moving through—and taking up—space.

  • Working serially within a set of fixed parameters, Weaver presses into the expressive possibilities of each figure. She paints her...

    Working serially within a set of fixed parameters, Weaver presses into the expressive possibilities of each figure. She paints her subjects from the inside out, giving form to an accumulation of bodily sensations and vulnerabilities, from the awkward constriction of exercise clothes or the wobbliness of a stomach, to the tentative strength of a leg thrust forward in motion or the sharp protrusion of an elbow or knee.

  • Each of Weaver’s female protagonists is set within a seamless streetscape of dashed lines and distorted crosswalks as she navigates...

    Each of Weaver’s female protagonists is set within a seamless streetscape of dashed lines and distorted crosswalks as she navigates the loose ends of urban debris. Traffic cones, cigarette butts, coffee cups, empty bottles, and the occasional banana litter these streets, as much a landscape of the mind as the residue of actual experience. The figures–all knees and elbows, grasping smartphones and fanny packs–appear constrained by the obstacles and impediments of their depicted landscape, if not the boundaries set by the actual edges of the canvas. In this way, Weaver’s subjects become a vessel for the often unspoken complexities of existing as a body in public, and a stand-in for the artist’s own experience.

  • Drawing is a part of Grace Weaver's daily practice. While creating the paintings for 11 Women, she made a number of preparatory studies with oil stick on paper. Here, the various shapes, colors, and compositions that appear in the paintings take form. In the artist’s words, the drawings reflect a desire to make expressly-rendered works that feel immediate and alive, "where the act of discovering the image is the work.”

  • Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Weaver has been the subject of...

    Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015. Weaver has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York, NY; Burlington, VT; Berlin, Oldenburg, Erlangen, and Reutlingen in Germany; Glasgow, Scotland; and Chennai, India. Her work is featured in the collections of institutions including FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; ARoS Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; and the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. Weaver lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

     

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