Anna Weyant (courtesy the artist)
A 27-year-old Calgary-born painter, Anna Weyant, is drawing huge attention in New York with works that are selling for more than a million dollars.
Her painting, Falling Woman, sold at a Sotheby's auction in late May for US$1.6 million, the latest in a series of jaw-dropping sales.
Weyant, based in New York City, is represented by Gagosian, one of the world's leading commercial galleries.
She uses a sombre palette in her figurative paintings and is influenced by 17th-century Dutch masters like Frans Hals, as well as contemporary artists.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a gossipy profile about Weyant, evoking "Boticelli as a millennial" and revealing that she is dating the much-older Gagosian.
Weyant, who comes from a legal family, earned a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and then studied at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
Her paintings came to notice on Instagram, where critics like Jerry Saltz shared her work with larger audiences.
“Being new, confused and homesick in a new country, I was just scared,” Weyant told the Wall Street Journal. “I remember thinking that if I could transfer my fears to the woman I was painting, at least I had another person in the conversation with me.”
Weyant's profile at Gagosian says she paints hapless subjects tested by everyday circumstances and weathering what she has called "low-stakes trauma."
"In these precisely rendered scenes, figures – most often young and female – find themselves embroiled in tragicomic narratives with an ironic twinge, offering a dreamlike insight into the capacity of popular culture and social convention to manufacture and distort gestures, rituals and signifiers of femininity," it says.
Weyant will have a solo show this fall at the Gagosian.