The art world awaits with enthusiasm what 2024 will bring, with an expected diverse array of showcases with both up-and-coming artists and experienced masters. Among the most talked artists is Anna Weyant, whose works with modern world themes captured many critics and art lovers throughout the world. The article will dive deep into Anna Weyant’s art and the notable art exhibitions that will be held this year throughout the world.
A Must-Known Name: Anna Weyant
Anna Weyant, born in Calgary in 1995, is a contemporary artist who highlights “low-stakes trauma” in everyday situations young and female figures face in her paintings and drawings. The figures she depicts are entangled in ironic tragicomic scenes that provide a surreal perspective on how popular culture and different social conventions can misrepresent feminine gestures and signifiers. Weyant received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and then studied painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Later, when she returned to New York, she continued to pursue new experiences as she worked as a studio assistant.
Anna Weyant’s Art
In her art, she not only underlines the symbolic meaning behind these women figures but also pays attention to envisioning characters who are charming, enigmatic, and unique to themselves. In a lot of her artwork, women are portrayed in gloomy, melancholic settings. As an example, Weyant’s first pieces that were displayed were a series of gloomy cinematic canvases that portrayed a dollhouse inspired by one she had as a child and its young female occupants. Meanwhile, in her still-life compositions, the subjects seem to be taking on an uncanny, foreboding quality.
Weyant uses a dark, subdued color scheme of dusty pinks, deep greens, and black in these and other pieces. She also incorporates elements she finds inspiring from art history and the modern era, influences such as from Frans Hals and Judith Leyster, two seventeenth-century Dutch masters, to Balthus, two twentieth-century mavericks, and even two contemporary painters, Jennifer Packer and Ellen Berkenblit.
As demonstrated by her participation in group shows such as Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2022) and Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Weyant demonstrates a keen awareness and appreciation of the historical and cultural context of her work while evoking strong feelings in viewers.
Best Exhibitions of 2024
Here is a selected list of best art exhibitions 2024 that are eye-catching for many art lovers and critics that highlight different mediums and themes of artworks.
Anselm Kiefer’s Fallen Angels at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence Mar. 22–July 21
“Fallen Angels” brings together contemporary and antique paintings, sculptures, and installations, and provides a glance at the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s career. Through his six-decade career, Kiefer emerged as one of the most significant characters in German art and was influenced by mythology, religion, philosophy, collective memory, and history, especially by the effects of World War II on Germany’s cultural identity.
Each work by Kiefer represents a rejection of boundaries in terms of the boundless resources he employs to delve into the depths of memory and the past. This rejection is visible in the materials he used, such as the use of charcoal and metal to portray the dark side of nature and industry in his critique of nationalism. The exhibition presents this diverse array of themes and materials inside the historical Renaissance building of Palazzo Strozzi.
Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956 – 1976 at Haus der Kunst, Munich
The relationship between art and the concept of “environment” is examined at the “Inside Other Spaces” exhibition through artworks made between 1956 and 1976 by eleven groundbreaking women artists. The exhibition will examine how these artists redefined and challenged space via their work and how environments are at the threshold between art and design by creating and transforming space. Including physically engaging works, the exhibition encourages the viewers to comprehend how we embody our surroundings and particular difficulties.
Caspar David Friedrich, Infinite Landscapes at Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin Apr. 19–Aug. 4
“Infinite Landscapes” celebrates the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich, an important painter of German romanticism. The major exhibition starts from separate points of entrance and explores Friedrich’s life and artworks in Hamburg, Dresden, and the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
There will be over sixty paintings and fifty drawings displayed by Friedrich, including world-famous iconic works of his. The exhibition aims at a rediscovery of his art and his creative process. His training as an artist and the latest scientific discoveries on his painting techniques are the subjects of one segment of the exhibition as well. Visitors can access the research conducted in this field at the Alte Nationalgalerie using a media station provided.
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction at Turner Contemporary, Margate
The group exhibition at Turner Contemporary this spring explores abstraction as a radical global language shared by women artists in the two decades after World War II. The showcase brings the works of over 50 artists together to explore how women challenged the conventions of artmaking while addressing profound cultural, social, and political changes through conceptual forms and practices. With more than 80 pieces of art, most of them sculpture, the show explores the global evolution of abstract language.
Photo Credit: “National Gallery of Art LED Tunnel” by hms831.
