Anke Weyer
Frightful Falls, Oct 27 – Dec 4, 2016

CANADA is pleased to announce Frightful Falls, an exhibition of new paintings by gallery artist Anke Weyer.

The paintings presented in Frightful Falls were created over the course of a long summer in a converted barn several hours outside of New York City. Unobserved except by nature and her newly adopted dog Flaco, Weyer painted freely and boldly, with spontaneity and objective. The canvases are tossed with aggressive and playful marks, oil paint emulsions, a drop of symbolism to describe chaos. Brushstrokes wrap and tremble creating nests around one another, paint thins, conjoins and splatters. In any given work there’s a variety of apertures and techniques, a convergence of energy with the raw matter of paint, about a million things going on.

Take Leave Early, 2016, a painting whose composition reaches all four corners with pockets of color, texture and gradation switching confrontationally across areas touching and bisected. Green, yellow and brown lines appear on the surface; then the possibility of a red boot, and another red shape with something coming out of it. If this painting were a scarecrow, its hay stuffing would be plummeting out of its head. A Godzilla effect, a Frankenstein or Incredible Hulk. Clothes torn by bulging muscles on steroids, sewn back together and torn again.

Weyer possesses an intense confidence with her medium. She is willing to destroy it to find new ways of working with it. The paintings convey a tenacity and psychological propulsion, evidenced by the way paint is moved, removed, and displaced by coils of activity. Weyer is fighting oppression with these things. At other times, she is planting a garden. The effect is highly dynamic, an attuned revelation of painting’s candor.

Anke Weyer was born in Karlsruhe, Germany (1974). Weyer attended the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (1995 – 2000) and undertook an exchange semester at the Cooper Union, New York. In addition to numerous international group exhibitions, Weyer’s work has been featured in solo shows and two-person presentations at CANADA in New York since 2000. Anke Weyer has had recent solo shows at Office Baroque, Brussels (2015), and Nino Mier, Los Angeles (2016). Group shows include “Women of Abstraction,” MOCA Jacksonville, FL (2016), and “The Ties That Bind,” David Achenbach Projects, Wuppertal, Germany (2016). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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