Anke Weyer
Anke Weyer (b. 1974, Karlsruhe, Germany) makes boldly expressive, large-scale oil and acrylic canvases that materialize an embodied and improvisational painting process.
Utilizing a wide palette of bold hues, the artist creates lively, buzzing colorscapes. Her works tackle histories and practices of expressionistic gesture while ultimately shirking a didactic stance on painting’s value, instead insisting on the open-endedness of the work’s potential interpretations. Weyer enacts an intense and hyperfocused engagement with her materials. This precise probing results in densely layered surfaces full of haptically energetic form.
Weyer paints unstretched canvas both inside the traditional studio and on an outdoor wooden platform where she starts by wetting the support with a wash of water and acrylic. In a dynamic but disciplined course of action, the artist adds subsequent layers in oil, purposefully using a variety of painterly techniques including splatters, smudges, scribbles, and stains that are applied with brushes, rags, fingers, blades, and other implements. Often, pours or fields of color are bounded by thick lines. As she works, Weyer scrapes or wipes away passages of her own mark-making, an instinctive process of dual creation-destruction wherein she repeatedly challenges her own decisions. Weyer characterizes her artmaking process as a kind of struggle and understands that tension to be indexed in her works’ final compositions, which display the urgency and immediacy of the artist’s engagement with her materials.
Artist: Studio
"I do not anticipate any particular emotion or response. On the contrary, I hope the works leave room for any possible interpretation. Showing a painting is rather like throwing my contribution into a dialogue than stating an aphorism."
Artworks
Exhibitions
Publications
Paintings, Anke Weyer, 2021
Anke Weyer
Paintings, 2021
Press
L.A. Letts "Carrie Moyer and Anke Weyer @ David Klein Gallery." Detroit Art Review May 12, 2021
Zach Fischman "Anke Weyer." Little Star Weekly May 6, 2016
Martha Schwendener "Anke Weyer: 'Du'." The New York Times January 10, 2014
Noah Dillon "Cold Days, Hot Paintings: A German in New York." Art in America January 2, 2014
Walter Robinson "Koenig of the Catskills." Artnet August 13, 2008
Stephen Maine "Thickets of Paint." The New York Sun June 14, 2007
Peter Frank "Les Fleurs Du Mal, Paper Bombs." LA Weekly April 18, 2007
Martin Coomer "Canada." Time Out London April 11, 2006
Roberta Smith "New York's Finest." The New York Times February 11, 2005
"The Lower East Side, Where Witty Meets Gritty." The New York Times November 15, 2002
CV
Anke Weyer
b. 1974 in Karlsruhe, Germany
Lives and works in Brooklyn and Upstate, NY
Education
2000
Hochschule fuer bildende Kuenste Staedelschule Frankfurt, Germany
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2024
Nocturnes, CANADA, New York, NY
2023
five or six paintings, Meierbach, Düsseldorf, Germany
2022
Slob, Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2021
Heart, Heart, CANADA, New York, NY
2019
Paintings, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2017
Elbow Hood Trunk, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
2016
Frightful Falls, CANADA, New York, NY
Gravity Idiot, Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2015
Two Islands are Better than One, Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium
Anke Weyer, Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY
2013
DU, CANADA, New York, NY
2007
Hogs and Dogs on Fire, CANADA, New York, NY
2000
CANADA, 359 Broadway, New York, NY