Grace Weaver. STEPS

While Grace Weaver’s early work mostly presented young, female protagonists in quiet introspection in intimate settings, in the paintings of her 2020 exhibition STEPS, she substantially raises the emotional stakes. Inspired by Frank O’Hara’s poem “A Step Away from Them” (1964), she daringly explores discomfort, insecurity, estrangement and embarrassment from one’s own body right in the bustling open of the city streets. With her maximalist use of an almost Fauvist palette, as Susan Thompson states, Weaver unfolds a spectacular theater of public life. Trying in vain to keep up appearances, her figures uneasily rush along, stumble, fall and downright weep. Though previously considered an individual struggle, during the pandemic anxiety became a universal reality. “That’s what it is to be human,” Weaver contemplates, “that struggle to stand upright.”