b.1974, Karlsruhe, DE
Lives and works in New York, NY, US
Anke Weyer’s abstract paintings act like mirrors reflecting the physical act of painting, with expressive, colorful gestures suggesting the artist’s scale and body. Weyer’s canvas works take on the challenge of monumental scale, and are best exemplified by the meandering, looping, heavy line dominating her surfaces. Such heavy lies—alongside the paint splatters and smudges applied by brushes, hands, blades, and rags that dominate her surfaces—index the placements of Weyer’s gesticulating arm. The works thereby function as a kind of portal to a punkish prelingual energy, contained like footprints or fossils on the works’ surfaces.
Working en plein air on a platform in her backyard, Weyer favors the uncontrollable context in which she paints. Weyer’s relationship to the natural world presents a unique set of trials and advantages, from weather’s consequences on the body and its effect on her materials, to her liberating ability to cast her paints freely about, the ever-shifting quality of natural light, and a more expansive sense of scale. Operating outside the carefully managed ecosystem of an indoor studio, Weyer therefore embraces chance and accident in her works, which express an unrestrained, fulsome approach to nonfigural painting.
Anke Weyer (b.1974, Karlsruhe, DE; lives and works in New York, NY, US) attended the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (1995 – 2000) and undertook an exchange semester at the Cooper Union, New York. Anke Weyer has had recent solo shows at CANADA, New York (2021), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2019), Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (2017), CANADA, New York (2016), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2016), Harper’s, East Hampton (2015) and Office Baroque, Brussels (2015).