Great romantic paintings usually show lovers entwined in passionate embraces, or staring lovingly into each others’ eyes. But there’s a different kind of romance in young American artist Grace Weaver’s big paintings: the mundanity of cohabitation, the endless trudge of everyday coupling.
Most of the works here show a man and woman together, painted in rough, super simplistic, bold, almost comic style. They have bright pink skin, slabs of colour for clothing, little triangles for eyes, geometric blobs for body parts. They pick up groceries, take out the trash, schlepp morosely across barren, rubbish-strewn wastelands. Are they coming back from the gym? Going to work? Who cares, what difference does it make. They seem caught in silent relationship no-man’s-land, the purgatory of the everyday. There's no over the top passion or love here, just two people going through life slowly, solemnly, acceptingly.
The single portraits of women push the clash of bright brash simplicity and quiet contemplation even further. These are stylish, stupidly simple, oddly affecting, and horribly relatable paintings. They feel like portraits of hot young people leaving a HIIT class, on the verge of a breakup, and really, that’s about as relatable as it gets..
