Anke Weyer
DU, Dec 19 – Jan 26, 2014

“DU is you, me, the painting, two letters whose form i like, a personal form of address.” - A. Weyer

CANADA is proud to present a new selection of paintings by Anke Weyer. Ms. Weyer is a long-time veteran of the CANADA community - her work was included in the gallery’s first exhibition over a decade ago.

In this exhibition of human scale canvases, Ms. Weyer speaks to the intimacy of the body, interior and exterior, each piece a flayed mass of colorful forms. Ms. Weyer is a skillful draftswoman who approaches painting with the same confident gestures as seen in her ink drawings. Compulsively drawing with a brush, rapidly filling tablets of paper, Weyer flushes out images from her subconscious and builds an index for her paintings. Swift marks are boldly layered and shapes fall into place, all colliding with teeming energy. Ms. Weyer’s process has a decisive pace and timing that maps its creative stages. Each canvas is carefully cooked to the right temperature with a kind of dischordant recipe to achieve its individual harmony.

The gutsy, color laden canvases evoke European abstraction and movements such as COBRA, Lyrical Abstraction, Action Painting and Taschisme but are injected with a sense of New York grit. Brash, active, and spontaneous they express an optimism and an anxiety toward contemporary painting. With illusions to primitive forms, pop art, handwriting and the human figure mashed into jumbled puddles of color. Forms appear and disappear; eyes, monstrous figures, cartoonish limbs, jumbled words, trees, suggestions of landscapes, calligraphic marks and sumptuous lines are carved by Weyer’s certain brush.

Ms. Weyer’s paintings have a distinctive capricious mood, like suddenly changing weather. Combining flat surfaces and deep space they give hints of locations and primal events. They are both the record of the process and a state of mind or a window into another consciousness.

“I like to keep the paintings close when making them. Despite their scale, I want to treat them like drawings, like those pieces of paper which allow me unfiltered expression.” - A. Weyer

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