NINO MIER GALLERY | 25

Working en plein air on a platform in her backyard, Weyer favors the uncontrollable context in which she paints. Weyer’s relationship to the natural world presents a unique set of trials and advantages, from weather’s consequences on the body and its effect on her materials, to her liberating ability to cast her paints freely about, the ever-shifting quality of natural light, and a more expansive sense of scale. Operating outside the carefully managed ecosystem of an indoor studio, Weyer therefore embraces chance and accident in her works, which express an unrestrained, fulsome approach to nonfigural painting. As the exhibition’s title suggests, the works in Slob take pleasure in a kind of impropriety and spirited disobedience, which find an almost musical rhythm in visual disorder.

Anke Weyer’s canvases are composed of traces of her own actions held together by a keen attunement to color, acting like mirrors that reflect the physical act of painting and echo the artist’s scale and body. The heavy lines, paint splatters, and smudges applied by brushes, hands, blades, and rags that dominate her surfaces index the placements of Weyer’s gesticulating arm. The works thereby function as a kind of portal to a punkish prelingual energy, contained like footprints or fossils on the works’ surfaces.

Anke Weyer updates the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, constructing colorful, abstract works notable for their unrestrained energy of color and form. The pastels in Slob are a direct exploration of visual structure and freedom. The relationship between Weyer’s body and the paper is intimate, for her hand holds the pastels directly, rather than being mediated by a tool like a brush. The variegated surfaces of her canvas works, on the other hand, are more audacious. They contain paint splatters, smudges and scrapes; large masses of color and more restrained detailing; erratic, recursive, or looping lines; and shapes, patterns, and letters used as formal objects. The full range of chromatic possibility is not sacrificed in the paintings and pastels, which favor boldness and brightness, even in more monochromatic works.

Anke Weyer (b.1974, Karlsruhe, Germany; lives and works in New York, US) attended the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (1995 – 2000) and undertook an exchange semester at the Cooper Union, New York. Anke Weyer has had recent solo shows at CANADA, New York (2021), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2019), Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (2017), CANADA, New York (2016), Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2016), Harper’s, East Hampton (2015) and Office Baroque, Brussels (2015).