Grace Weaver — Hotel Paintings — Max Hetzler Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 13 → February 17, 2024

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Hotel Paintings, a solo exhibition of work by Grace Weaver, and the artist’s first solo presentation in France. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings alongside a series of collages made during the artist’s recent travels in Morocco.

Weaver explores the unique atmosphere elicited in hotel rooms as spaces which are both intimate and anonymous, timeless yet transitory. The controlled cast of figures participate in the specific script of behaviours conditioned by the limited provision of a hotel room: a highly staged, utopic domestic environment. Reading, lounging, writing, washing and thinking, the characters are presented in various stages of undress, capturing a sense of emotional liminality and fleeting in-betweenness.

Weaver’s practice investigates what she self-terms as the ‘poetry of tiny moments, the small increments that make up modern life’, transforming seemingly unremarkable settings into contemplative realms, inviting reflection on the profound within the ordinary. Drawing inspiration from the eternal nature of staged effigies in Russian as well as Byzantine religious iconography, Weaver’s figures are imbued with a similar sense of sacred significance. Much like icons which served as conduits to the divine, the characters operate as emotional proxies, vessels through which modern experiences are projected, transcending the specificities of time and place.

Taking their compositional cues from Henri Matisse, the Hotel Paintings play with line and form as Weaver reverses, tilts and warps traditional notions of perspective. Furniture and objects are abstracted into trapezoids and elongated triangles, in colour fields of cornflower blue, deep red, golden yellow and bottle green, creating a sensation of spatial envelopment. The figures themselves, fleshy sweeps of pink and tan, almost dissolve at times into the background’s taupe, beige and ochre, emphasising the interplay between the figures and their surroundings.

This sense of constructed abstraction is particularly apparent in Weaver’s collages which were made during her extended trip, where the artist travelled through Marrakesh, Fes, Essaouira, Casablanca, Rabat and Tangier. Drawing pertinent visual references to the country’s rich landscape, and with distinct citations to designs found in the YSL Museum in Marrakesh, each collage depicts a simplified woman mid-stride, a prototypical tourist visiting Morocco. Made from objects found in pharmacies, supermarkets and book shops, the collaged figures step through cinema schedules, swinging Mentos bags, clothed in Tabasco dresses, Coca-Cola skirts and tropical fruit tops. Merging figurative, ornamental and commercial elements, Weaver’s collages transform the environment of her Moroccan hotel rooms from painted settings to physical places where art is made. ​​​​​​

Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in international institutions including Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Neues Museum, Nürnberg (both 2023); Oldenburger Kunstverein; Kunstpalais Erlangen (both 2019); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2017); and Dakshina Chitra, Chennai (2012). Weaver’s work has also been exhibited in group exhibitions including Braunsfelder, Cologne; Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin; Miettinen Collection, Berlin; Neue Galerie, Gladbeck; Villa Merkel, Esslingen (all 2022); Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2021); Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2018); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (2016); University of Georgia (2015); Burlington City Arts (2013); Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington (2012); Colburn Gallery, University of Vermont, Burlington (2011); and Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010).

Weaver’s works are in the collections of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf; Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art; Samlung Philara, Düsseldorf; and Yuz Foundation.