Grace Weaver – Untitled

Grace Weaver's Untitled (2024) depicts a figure in athletic wear surrounded by the detritus of contemporary domestic life—laptop, dumbbells, furniture, personal objects—rendered in her signature expressive line work and tonal play. The work exemplifies Weaver's practice of chronicling female experience through the body: here, the figure navigates the performance of wellness, productivity, and self-optimization that defines millennial womanhood. In an art historical moment dominated by abstraction, Weaver's commitment to figurative painting as a site for examining the anxieties and contradictions of everyday female life reasserts the relevance of genre painting to contemporary experience.

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, she explores new ways of depicting the human form, breathing new life into 21st-century painting. In her work, 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 works, 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.
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 work chronicles female experiences in both the private and public realm, painting 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 work is 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.