Editor’s Note
As TEFAF New York opens, Gagosian’s booth promises to be a highlight, featuring a specially designed setting for Anna Weyant’s new series of intimately scaled paintings that capture jewelry with playful precision.
When TEFAF New York opens next week, expect Gagosian—and its superstar artist Anna Weyant—to deliver a gem of a booth. The gallery is showcasing a fresh body of work by Weyant in a booth especially designed to complement her new intimately scaled paintings of jewelry. From opalescent pearls to dainty gold chains, these objects have been rendered by the Canadian painter with her signature playful, precise illusionism.
Key to the trompe l’oeil effect is Weyant’s meticulous attention to light and shadow, which lends her necklaces, bracelets, and earrings a naturalistic sheen recalling the still lifes of the Dutch Golden Age. Weyant has also depicted each piece mounted on a brown frame, as if showcased in a jewelry box or a retail store. The viewer is invited to admire their beauty and craft, perhaps even consider their significance to their wearers.
Cheekily, some objects are accompanied by price tags (at least one with a red dot sticker), reminders that there’s often commerce behind these jewels. This meeting of classic formalism and a modern-day wit—or “Instagram meets old painting,” as the artist told Juxtapoz—has long been threaded through Weyant’s practice, spurring her rise in the art world.
Since her splashy solo debut at New York gallery 56 Henry in 2019, Weyant has been roundly embraced for her unparalleled technique as much as her mysterious, dreamlike scenes which seem to portend despair or some kind of menace.
Weyant has been represented by Gagosian since 2022, during which time she’s seen her stock rise alongside the prices of her artworks. Amid three international shows with the gallery—most recently “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolves?” in London—she achieved her auction record when her dramatic Falling Woman (2020) sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2022 for $1.6 million.
At the TEFAF booth, Weyant’s new paintings will be joined by her still life of a vase overflowing with a cornucopia of flowers, mirroring the floral motifs in her Daisy Necklace and Daisy Earrings canvases. They’ll be on view in a booth with lavender walls and a pine-hued carpet handpicked by the artist, creating an effect not unlike that of a jewel box.
And Weyant knows her gems. These new works echo a pair of canvases from 2021, in which she similarly explored the hidden lives of jewelry. The painter also happens to be one of the faces of Tiffany & Co.’s new line of HardWear, launched earlier this month. Her new brush with jewelry follows her first cover for Vogue’s December 2024 issue, for which she painted model Kaia Garber in a strikingly blue Marc Jacobs dress.
