Anke Weyer
Hogs and Dogs on Fire, May 18 – Jun 17, 2007

CANADA is proud to present new paintings by Anke Weyer, our final exhibition in a year long series of solo shows by women.

Cutting, splashing, slashing, dribbling and dropping: the tactile qualities of Anke Weyer’s expressionistic paintings nearly explode off of the canvas. Swirls of color, which correspond not only to nature, but states of mind, fuse to create a unified world, as if the paintings emerged from a mountain instead of Weyer’s studio.

Weyer’s paintings teem with fragments of figures and broken bits of architecture. The bodies and eyes of animals frequently populate her paintings. Strange wolf eyes stare out at us, as if the painting is hunting us in some feral display of artistic turnaround. The nature that inhabits Weyer’s canvases are not cool depictions of vistas or landscape, rather they are fields of action, full of atmosphere, deep and moody recesses cut with spatters of consequence.

Living in the United States for almost eight years, the black forest of her youth has become mythical and mentally processed. There is a newly found dark humor to the work in Hogs and Dogs on Fire. Wolves sporting Bart Simpson hairdos, unthinkable only a few years ago, turn up to add a dose of levity. Color glows with the intensity of a fireworks display, a funny and horrifying mediation on the title of the show.

Weyer maintains a connection with expressionism and applies it to our shared history and contemporary environment. The language of paint has been wedded to suggestive and fanciful imagery. The pop and archetypal references are felt surprises when combined with color and gesture that are so confident and plain that they appear almost as worn articles of clothing or old friends.

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