Artist: Anna Weyant

Gagosian presents Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?, Anna Weyant’s first exhibition in London. In her new paintings, Weyant infuses elements of autobiography with the symbolic wit, portentous mood, and refined technique that distinguished Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over, her 2022 Gagosian debut in New York, and The Guitar Man, her 2023 debut in Paris.

Weyant’s precisely rendered figure paintings and portraits undercut their subjects’ attempts at composure with gestures of tragicomic awkwardness, while her crystalline still-life compositions lend everyday objects a similarly unsettling and oneiric tinge, their muted palette contributing a reflective ambience. The six new paintings that comprise Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves? retain this mood in atmospheric scenarios of distance and isolation.

In Girl in Window (all works 2024), the subject’s breasts are glimpsed through a small window, her head and shoulders covered by a fabric blind. A vine curls around the edge of the portal, one heart-shaped leaf shielding the left nipple like a fig leaf on a classical statue. There is a surreal charge to such semiotic shifts and withdrawals that is consistent with the fairy-tale reference of the exhibition’s title, and that resonates with Weyant’s previous works, especially eerie depictions of dollhouses such as House Exterior (2023).

In It’s Coming from inside the House, a seated figure hides behind a large, blank newspaper that renders its reader wholly unavailable, a defensive mystery both within the world of the image and to the viewer of the work. Here, My Dear incorporates a framed portrait of a woman glancing over her left shoulder, the light from a window striking the wall against which the inverted likeness rests. The portrait image’s off-kilter position contributes to a tension and ambiguity that hints at an ongoing reevaluation of identity and role.