Anke Weyer: Flying free

Contributed by Rick Briggs / If I’m being completely honest, for years I never completely got the work of Anke Weyer. Sure, she’s always had all the right moves – bold color, loose paint handling, and a juicy surface, all of which gave her work directness, spontaneity, and immediacy – but something felt off. The color was mostly discordant, and the gesture appeared merely aggressive, with an attitude that seemed anarchistic, almost like a form of punk nihilism. My perception began to change with “Nocturnes,” Weyer’s 2024 show at CANADA. I noticed the paintings began to slow down with masses of organic color shapes in works like Lucky, Sleepless and Monster. The real eye-opener for me was the stunning Morningstar and Echo, which I saw at Leo Koenig’s space in Andes, NY, in 2025. Worked in layers of flooded acrylic and oil on the ground, the piece still featured her loose brushwork and bright palette, but now her exuberant mark-making had an assured, relaxed quality and her color choices had become harmonious and unifying. The work exuded openness and solidity at the same time, which is very hard to pull off.

This quality has carried over to her current show at CANADA, “Beautiful Rejects.” The concept originated with a group of paintings she had worked on and abandoned a decade earlier, rolled up and left on a shelf. As any painter will tell you, “rejects” make the best surfaces to work on because you have nothing to lose – you’re free to cut loose. And cut loose she does. “Beautiful Rejects” presents Weyer at the top of her game, flinging, pouring, splashing, and dragging paint with masterful confidence and freedom. The energy of her engagement with the canvas is contagious – one can’t help but get caught up in the action and excitement of her process. 

The gorgeous Fly High and Free, which could be the subtitle of the exhibition, is a good example. On a field of bubblegum pink and black she has flung white, fleshy pink, and a couple of oranges, adding distinctive marks with a thick brush-load of Prussian blue. If the flesh-tone and wet-into-wet application puts you in mind of de Kooning, you would not be far off, as her work does have roots in Abstract Expressionism. It couldn’t have hurt to have worked with Per Kirkeby, her teacher and, in my opinion, one of the best painters to come out of Europe in the last half century. And Weyer evokes Joan Mitchell in the massive, feathery, cerulean blue cloud hovering in My Shadow, which takes up almost half the painting, buoyed by strips of black and white and strategically placed bits of ochre, creating a nifty spatial tension between foreground and background.

Sloth, at over seven feet tall, is the largest painting and also the slowest, which might account for its title. It involves fewer dramatic splashes of paint or grand gestures and imparts a sense of deliberate composition. Large, strange shapes nestle side-by-side or slightly overlap, vaguely resembling elements of animals, possibly horses heads, as if this were her version of a cave painting. It also resembles a giant kindergarten painting, a genuine accomplishment for painters who value a childlike approach.

Weyer has described her work as a kind of dance with “failure.” Certainly, hers is a most vulnerable way of working: not depending on recognizable imagery, illusionism, or predetermined geometry to provide a sense of order. It becomes a kind of existential struggle in which anything can happen, and the next move can bring either disaster or exultation. And that risk is exactly what’s so exciting about this work. Each painting is treated separately, each with its own path of development, ensuring the integrity of her project. But all the paintings have something in common.  They all insist on their presence by virtue of the physicality of paint and what paint does, the viscous surface, the power of color and the expressive mark. Fly high and free, indeed!

“Anke Weyer: Beautiful Rejects,” CANADA, 60 Lispenard Street, New York, NY. Through May 9, 2026.

About the author: Rick Briggs is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn.  He occasionally writes and curates.