Petzel is pleased to present the fifth installment of The Viewing Room, a series of presentations and events that bring together artists, curators, and historians in conversation around new and significant works. This iteration features a selection of recent paintings by New York and Berlin-based artist Grace Weaver. Opening on November 15, The Viewing Room: Grace Weaver serves as an introduction to the artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition with Petzel, opening in summer 2026.

The Viewing Room: Grace Weaver showcases recent paintings that continue the artist’s investigation into the language of the human figure across art history. In her most recent work, Weaver references Paleolithic, Neolithic, Greek, and Egyptian statuary to consider how these early figures, often female, embody gestures and forms that persist into the present. A bowed head, a hand to the chest, or an embrace between mother and child each reflect enduring modes of human expression that remain legible across millennia – a “paradox of making eternal something totally temporary,” as the artist notes in her recent Louisianna Channel interview, Eternity Captured in a Gesture.

In her ‘Mother’ paintings, Weaver reimagines archetypal motifs of the mother and child through monumental, tenderly intertwined figures. Her interest in this subject was born out of sketches of a Boeotian terracotta figurine of a woman cradling a child, which she encountered at the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany. Here, Weaver loosens her figures, allowing the initial line to lead the composition while keeping the subject perceptible to the viewer in a recursive logic, in which process and outcome inform one another. In her ‘Mourner’ painting, Weaver turns to the archaic prototypes of Greek Kore figures, whose bowed heads and folded hands felt to her like a current gesture of lamentation, across the years that separate them.

Weaver embodies these gestures by painting flat on the floor as if she is drawing in a sketchbook, allowing the canvases to record the composite form of both her inspiration and her movements. The figures of the past coalesce in the present as wide, sweeping brushstrokes of cobalts and ochres against a chalky wash. Painted wet-on-wet, the canvas becomes an amalgamation of time, movement, color, all while emphasizing the immortality and historicity of the female figure. Weaver continues to masterfully expand her visual vocabulary, exploring how far she can move away from reality while still evoking empathy and emotion.

About Grace Weaver

Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont) lives and works in New York and Berlin. She holds a BA from the University of Vermont, Burlington, and earned an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond.

Recent solo exhibitions include the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Neues Museum Nürnberg (both 2023–2024); Oldenburger Kunstverein; Kunstpalais Erlangen (both 2019); Kunstverein Reutlingen (2017); and DakshinaChitra, Chennai (2012). Weaver’s work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Oldenburger Kunstverein (2025); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2023); Braunsfelder, Cologne; Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin; Miettinen Collection, Berlin; Neue Galerie, Gladbeck; Villa Merkel, Esslingen (all 2022); Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2021); Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2018); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (2016); University of Georgia (2015); Burlington City Arts (2013); Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Burlington (2012); Colburn Gallery, University of Vermont, Burlington (2011); and Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010).

Weaver’s work is included in collections such as ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, USA; Fleming Museum of Art, Burlington, USA; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; K&L Museum, Gwacheon, South Korea; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA; Philara Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany; Yuz Foundation, Shanghai, China; 8smicka Collection, Humpolec, Czech Republic; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK; among others.