Beautiful Rejects

CANADA is pleased to announce Beautiful Rejects, Anke Weyer's seventh one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title refers to Weyer's discovery of a trove of unfinished canvasses in her studio last spring. Squirrelled away for ten years or more, the canvasses weren't ready to be discarded, but they were never finished either. Weyer unrolled them and created totally new paintings on top of her previous efforts. The long gap between periods of active painting gave Weyer insight into her gradual progress as she noticed forms and colors that were reminiscent of earlier phases of her work. Beautiful Rejects is a painted tribute to her own practice, an opportunity to expand and rediscover her trajectory with results that are both weighty and full of pleasure. Weyer's work draws on a wide range of influences, from weather-beaten urban graffiti to the nature that surrounds her upstate studio, as well as the complex legacy of postwar abstraction. Her paintings resist direct reference, instead cultivating a language of marks and color that are playful, unruly, and psychologically charged. Working with a remarkable freedom, she thins and pours the paint, whipping it up with water to create mayonnaise-like emulsions, or mixing it with thick oil to produce smears that pucker and wrinkle as they cure in the sun. Whatever the material exploration she chooses, Weyer's paintings always display her trademark fearlessness, generating a sense of order hovering on the edge of chaos. Layers of marks collide and recombine across the surfaces. The works oscillate between abstraction and suggestion: fragments of language, cartoonish forms, and symbolic shapes surface before dissolving back into fields of energetic marks and smoky atmosphere. The paintings feel as though they were painted by the weather, maybe a sudden gust of wind or a ray of sunlight breaking through the clouds. The paintings carry both a weightless sensation and a solidity, confounding simple readings.