Grace Weaver (born in Vermont, USA, in 1989) is one of the most interesting young painters working today. With her larger-than-life paintings, she explores new ways of depicting the human form, breathing new life into 21st-century figurative painting.

The exhibition ‘Prélude’ displays works from the Flower (2024) and Mothers (2025) series. Both series share a concentrated interest in line, posture and painterly gesture.
In the Flower series, the flowers appear as physical, almost figurative forms, standing upright, hanging down or intertwined in a tangle of stems, oscillating between abstraction and emotional expression. The Mothers series depicts monumental images of archetypal scenes: mothers with children and female nudes. Weaver's paintings draw on motifs from various eras, such as ancient terracotta figures, Cranach's Madonnas, and Egyptian statuettes, and the postures are reminiscent of iconic representations of Eve or Aphrodite. In contrast to their art-historical predecessors, however, they do not move in a sphere of untouchable beauty, but convey a contemporary approach to identity, physicality and female experience that oscillates between self-protection and openness.

Fig: Grace Weaver, Untitled (Mother and Child), 2025, acrylic on canvas, 300 x 500 cm
© Grace Weaver, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London | Marfa.