Anke Weyer
Nocturnes, Jan 12 – Feb 24, 2024

Canada is pleased to announce Nocturnes, a solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based painter Anke Weyer. In a new group of rhythmic, gestural works, Weyer continues to index a highly physicalized painting practice that results in vividly colored compositions full of overlapping squiggles, daubs, washes, and drips. In her bustling canvases, Weyer embraces improvisation, adding and scraping away pigment in a spontaneous and instinctive process.

In this recent series, Weyer works at a slightly smaller scale, allowing her to explore new forms and compositions. With these nocturnes, Weyer also investigates a darker tone and palette. In Engel, hues of salmon pink, black, and white intermingle in a cacophony of swirling forms. Criss-crossing splatters of undiluted pink hover near the painting’s middle. Below it, horizontal slashes of black butt up against a wide section of sloping organic lines of mixed hues. With her unorthodox technique of putting the paint on and then washing it off, Weyer purposefully muddies her medium. Black acrylic runs over other colors, creating a kind of dirtiness that produces a greater amount of movement and emotion on the canvas. Working with these sullied and more oblique tones, the timbre of this body of work is elusive, private, and intimate.

Frequently, outsized painterly passages anchor the works, attended by a backdrop of built-up layers of color and gesture. In Lucky, a scrawl of giant, bright yellow strokes backed by a halo of white splotches dominates the painted field. Around it, Weyer has added murky fields of deep black, marigold, mahogany, and forest green–a discordant effect achieved through a series of athletic and methodical movements. Crazy, features jumbo pours of vibrant baby blue paint that are outlined in black, reinforcing their primacy. Behind them is a forest of green stains and blotches, wooshes of orangey-pink, and a cascade of lemon yellow.

Weyer understands her canvas as a hypersensitive surface that mirrors everything in the environment around it, including light, air, and the affect of its maker. These fitful and turbulent compositions are instilled with the metaphorics of a sleepless night wherein a restless body acutely feels every sensation.

Anke Weyer (b. 1974, Karlsruhe, Germany) lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She attended the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany from 1995-2000 where she studied with Danish artist Per Kirkeby and spent an exchange semester at the Cooper Union, New York. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville; Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueño, Oaxaca; CANADA, New York; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles and Brussels; Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp; Harper’s, East Hampton; and Office Baroque, Brussels; MEIERBACH, Düsseldorf; David Klein, Detroit; Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Lucie Fontaine, Milan; David Achenbach Projects, Wuppertal; Páramo Galería, Guadalajara; Galerie Ceysson & Bénetière, Windhof; Makebish Gallery, New York; AUTOCENTER, Berlin; Joilie Laide, Philadelphia; Leo Koenig Projekte, New York; After the Gold Rush, Brooklyn; Galleri Loyal, Stockholm; Mary Goldman Gallery, Los Angeles; Galería Comercial, San Juan; Counter Gallery, London; Champion Fine Art, Brooklyn; Pekao Gallery, Toronto; Galerie Otto, Copenhagen; and Daimlerstrasse, Frankfurt.

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