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.

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