Grace Weaver – Hotel Amour

Hotel Amour (2023) is a hand-signed and numbered four-color lithograph on Somerset handmade paper, Grace Weaver's first edition for the German art magazine Texte zur Kunst.

The print shows a couple at a Mediterranean hotel, each turned away from the other and absorbed in a book rather than in each other, the Brooklyn-based artist's signature light-pink, larger-than-life figures bent to fit the frame. A red towel draped in front of the foregrounded reader's bare leg nods to Brigitte Bardot's in Godard's "Le Mépris," and the shifting tension between the two figures recalls the charged interiors of Matisse.

The motif belongs to a new body of work that Weaver debuted at Galerie Max Hetzler's Paris space in early 2024, extending her ongoing interest in the tedium and quiet intimacy of contemporary women's daily lives.

Grace Weaver (born 1989 in Vermont) is recognized as one of the most significant contemporary painters working in figurative abstraction today. Through large-scale paintings and works on paper, she explores new ways of depicting the human form, breathing new life into 21st-century figurative artworks. In her practice, Weaver treats the body not just as a subject but as a site—a stage on which line is choreographed in lyrical gestures, and through which emotion comes to the fore. In recent artworks, she turns to archetypal motifs including the mother and child and the female nude.

Weaver graduated with a BA in Studio Art from the University of Vermont in 2011 and received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015, distinguished by a VCUarts Dean's Graduate Research Grant. Her compositions demonstrate sophisticated consciousness of painting technique itself: working across watercolor, oil, acrylic, and pastel, she develops a distinct choreography of color and brushwork that results in works where surface comes together in all-over, wet-into-wet convergence. This technical rigor extends to her prints and limited edition works, where she maintains the same intensity of gesture and tonal complexity as her monumental paintings.

Her visual vocabulary is steeped in art historical and literary references—from Cranach, Georg Baselitz and Henri Matisse, to Homer and James Joyce. Her influences range from the torqued perspectives of American Regionalism to the gravity of Piero della Francesca's paintings and the monumental figuration of Jose Clemente Orozco's murals. Her figures feature distinctive palettes of bright pink and squash-colored skin, recalling 19th- and 20th-century artists like the Fauves and Les Nabis, with voluminous, curving bodies that trace back to Fernand Léger and Neoclassical Picasso.

As a psychological archive of daily activities, Weaver's artworks chronicle female experiences in both the private and public realm, painting and drawing only from physical scales that match or supersede her own. The compositions revive and challenge the tradition of genre painting in contemporary form, interweaving symbols that are at once contemporary and eternal.

Weaver's paintings, prints, and drawings are held in important public and private collections worldwide, including the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, the Pizzuti Collection, and the FRAC des Pays de la Loire. She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler and James Cohan Gallery. She lives and works in Berlin and New York.