Anna Weyant shares her home with a ghost. Not the metaphorical kind; not the ghost of painters before her, nor the ghost of her early, soaring success. Just the standard issue, after-life sort of ghost.
“When I first moved in, I just felt this presence of a spirit and started researching the building — more and more things were happening and I thought: somebody’s here. There were certain areas that I didn’t want to go into. I ended up finding out that somebody had passed away in my bedroom. And so I actually found out where his widow lived,” she tells me as we enter the studio space of her apartment.
To be in touch with her, I ask?
“No, I read him the address one night to see if he might want to go there, because it’s just down the street.”
Weyant, aged just 30, is one of the most successful and spoken about young painters in the world. She lives with her elderly King Charles spaniel, Sprout, in a sedate, beautiful space uptown, which strikes me as I enter it as notably old New York, dark wood and low lighting, not fussy or self-consciously sophisticated, but definitively adult. Everything uptown feels a little more permanent, the residents older, more fixed, less subject to the temporal shifts of the city, and it makes sense to me as we speak that she has chosen to exist here rather than in a trendier neighbourhood or apartment. Despite some caustic dismissals about the nature of her career, Weyant is in it for the long haul.
We are meeting in advance of her first major museum show, which opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid this month. This will be the first exhibition to draw from her entire output, through 26 paintings, predating her first New York solo show in 2019, Welcome to the Dollhouse, and past her most recent in London, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves? in 2024. Particularly appealing about the exhibition, according to Weyant, was the opportunity to select works from the Thyssen’s collection to be presented alongside her own, including a Magritte, a Balthus and a beguiling portrait by the German painter Christian Schad. One senses that the opportunity not only to show the growth of her own work, but also to declare some influences not typically ascribed to Weyant, is important to her.
“There’s only one work that I really was insistent on having, this big painting called ‘Feted’ [2020] that I’ve never shown before which was in a private collection in New York, and we had to talk somewhere into loaning it, and they did,” she says. “And then my most recent painting. Actually, no — it doesn’t have my most recent painting. It was going to have my most recent painting, but last night I killed it.”
Killed it for this show, I ask, or will you never return to it?
“I’ll cut it up,” she says easily. “I’ve killed the last three.”
Weyant is aware that she could easily sell this and more or less anything else she might choose — “I’m sure I could just send it out and it would be fine, but at this point, if it’s not exciting, it’s not worth it for me to let it out into the world” — but her market value has become something of an albatross around the neck of her career, as has much of the lore surrounding her beginnings.
Weyant’s origins are so well established that her publicist is able to succinctly list them in one brief parenthesis as items to avoid focusing on: high auction prices, Instagram, comparisons to Botticelli, selling paintings on beach towels in the Hamptons. It’s unusual for an artist to have such widely known bullet points, the kind your average person would ordinarily be able to cite about a Real Housewife or pop star, but Weyant has the unusual confluence of undeniable generational gifts as a painter and the sort of personal star power and beauty that is bait to tabloids (the Daily Mail comes in for particular outrage when we discuss her relationship to her media coverage — they published photographs of the interior of her old apartment).
Although the attention was partly to do with the spurious claim that her meteoric success began with “being discovered on Instagram”, it rocketed after Weyant began dating Larry Gagosian, the immensely successful gallerist who now represents her. The relationship has since ended, and Weyant is now with the musician Jason Isbell; she and I debrief for a bit about dating men who have children.
Before meeting Weyant I had worried that I did not have the sufficient ruthlessness to bring up the relationship with Gagosian, what I assumed would be a source of tiresome displeasure for her. Luckily she does it for me, with the same gentle openness she communicates with all afternoon. I asked about how her work has formally developed in recent years.
“In the past few years, as I started to have more market attention and wider attention, that’s when I decided I needed to step it up again. I also had entered into a relationship with my art dealer at the time. There was a lot of talk that maybe the success had come from that, and I’m not denying that at all, but I felt like if that was going to be the narrative, then I was just gonna have to go full speed ahead and make the best fucking work I could.”
It’s easy to see why the shorthand (if somewhat lazy) narrative of Weyant as a “millennial Botticelli” worked. Her early paintings do often have a jarring wit and juxtaposition that could be read as frivolous — she paints many pretty women, many of them her friends and muses, in a style often likened to the Dutch or Renaissance masters, but with knowing contemporary details (I love 2018’s “Sip n’ Paint”, a woman painting a gaudy Paris skyline with a glass of wine). But her work has always been more destabilising and surreal than caricature, her pony-ponytail meeting in 2019’s “My Pony” bringing inexorably to mind the sumptuous mercurial womanhood of Twin Peaks.
When I ask about the initial development of what would become her style, Weyant refers to a year she spent studying in China after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. “I had nothing to lose and kind of nothing to gain. It was a really weird, dark, lonely time, but also so beautiful and poetic. I was alone a lot, I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t know how to get around. I was just sort of jogging and painting, and so lonely and so homesick. Which was so good for me, and shaped my practice.”
Her more recent work has, as often as the gorgeous soft wide-faced women, the kind of euphoric unsettling discord that makes the Magritte selection in her Thyssen show so relevant. And further, as I spent time with her monograph, I found that who I was thinking of most often was not any Dutch master but Philip Guston. The work of hers I love the most (and what I would be acquiring if I found myself with a few million to spare) is the disturbing cartoon mask-like figure of “A Disaster, Such A Catastrophe” (2022).
The novelist Emma Cline, a friend and subject of Weyant’s, told me: “She’s a true artist — her involvement with her work is total. It’s like life comes second to her art practice. She’d rather be painting than doing anything else.”
As we conclude, Weyant is eager to show me the painting she will soon destroy, in that studio space that looks more like the room for a character in Succession to swill brown liquor and brood. She unveils it, a portrait of her friend Ariana, a painter in LA, obscured by a window frame.
“I just wasn’t vibing with it, I wasn’t getting the face, so I thought, I’m going to cover it up with the window and then it looked shittier and so I’m throwing [in] the towel.”
How does that feel? She shrugs.
“Today I’ll move on.”
July 15-October 12, museothyssen.org
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