Galerie Max Hetzler is happy to current Moms, an exhibition of latest work by Grace Weaver at Goethestraße 2/3. This marks the artist’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery, and her first in certainly one of our Berlin areas.
In her newest collection, Grace Weaver turns to archetypal motifs, together with the mom and youngster, and the feminine nude. For Weaver, the physique isn’t just a topic however a website – a stage on which line is choreographed in lyrical gestures, and thru which emotion involves the fore. Regardless of their monumental scale, Weaver’s new works disclose humble topics and tender sentiments.
Throughout a collection of enormous square-format canvases, Weaver’s moms pose in enveloping embraces: swaying, kneeling, or cradling kids of their laps. Alongside these, a number of work function solitary feminine figures in bowing stances paying homage to Eve or Aphrodite, trying to defend their nude our bodies from the viewer’s gaze. Against this, the mom and youngster work suggest a triangularity of gazes: at instances both mom or youngster stares outward, at others they continue to be locked in each other’s gaze. Elongated, curving necks recall the postures of Weaver’s ‘Flowers’ collection (2024). As on this earlier physique of labor, Weaver’s central motif is recognisable, and but drifts in direction of abstraction; limbs taper into house, and abbreviated traces merely counsel clothes or contours. Whether or not in flowers or figures, Weaver’s major topic appears to be posture itself, used as a method to convey subtleties of temper.
Weaver paints on the ground, utilizing an all-over fresco-like course of. Over a base of black, she applies watery matte washes of paint with over-sized brushes. Working wet-on-wet, the artist paints ‘within the spherical’, transferring across the canvas as if executing a dance of deliberate, curving gestures. The saturated canvas turns into a responsive floor, absorbing every mark and resisting revision. Traces rhyme and harmonise. Surrounding the determine’s arcing outlines, haptic drips from Weaver’s overloaded brush register her actions, bringing the immediacy of drawing into portray. Weaver prepares for every portray in successive ballpoint pen sketches, decreasing figures to some important traces, in order that the ultimate act of portray proceeds in a decided choreography. The portray’s palettes – inky cobalts, pale pastels and papery cream tones – recall the supplies of drawing.
Weaver’s investigation of the mom and youngster motif started in sketches of a diminutive fifth-century BCE Boeotian terracotta figurine of a lady nursing a younger youngster, impressed by its formal abstraction and emotive actuality. As she developed the collection, references multiplied, with subsequent works drawing from Cranach’s Madonnas, with their crimped hairstyle and rubbery anatomy. All through, Weaver cites poses from Cypriot sandstone collectible figurines, Netherlandish altarpieces, Egyptian statuettes of Isis and Horus, Orthodox Marian icons, and numerous historical Greek ‘kourotrophoi.’ Regardless of the breadth of influences, of their immediacy, Weaver’s work step outdoors of the specificities of time, house and allegory. Unadorned and shut, they communicate not of divine authority however of bodily intimacy, vulnerability and a uncommon looseness of posture and presence.
Grace Weaver’s work can even be on view as a part of a joint exhibition with Günther Förg at Galerie Max Hetzler | Salon in Athens from 16 September – 8 November 2025.
