"The title is a play on the term “fallen woman.” I wanted the fall to be sexy and kind of fun. It started with an Edward Gorey illustration of a girl tripping down a grand staircase. The woman in my painting is upside down, almost like a Georg Baselitz figure, only the pose is meant to be naturally occurring, not intentionally flipped."
Her mouth agape, hair flowing, and eyes wide with alarm, Anna Weyant’s titular Falling Woman dominates the canvas with visceral fear as she tumbles down a flight of stairs. With an extreme close-up of her upside-down head and breasts emerging from her décolletage, however, the composition is imbued with a surprising, irreverent humor. Successfully eliciting the disparate emotions of disquietude and beguilement in equal measure, Falling Woman from 2020 is an exceptional work from one of the most intriguing and engaging artistic outputs in contemporary art.
"[Weyant’s work] doesn’t rely on knowledge of insider references, but it kind of has a language that can be widely understood, widely legible."
The youngest artist to be internationally represented by Gagosian Gallery, Weyant is amidst a meteoric rise for her figurative tableaux that are simultaneously infused with playful humor and somber tragedy. Her signature oil paintings illustrate young women undergoing the common experience of striving to maintain appearances while negotiating the inner self-described “low-stakes trauma of girlhood” (the artist quoted in conversation with Noor Brara, "Artist Anna Weyant Paints the Indignities of Being a Young Woman—and Collectors of All Ages Can’t Get Enough," 16 September 2021, artnet news (online)).
Discussing the inspiration for the present work, Weyant describes, “the idea was that artifice can’t prevent you from making a complete fool of yourself. Even in a Balenciaga dress, there’s still a chance you might face-plant down a flight of stairs holding a glass of champagne. I guess embarrassment can be a real equalizer in that way.” (the artist quoted in “The Credible Image: An Interview of Anna Weyant on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition Loose Screw,” 5 March, 2021, Autre Magazine, (online)) Falling Woman thus typifies the macabre comedy that pervades her oeuvre, underscoring the ironic idiosyncrasy of her subjects’ exceedingly meticulous, elegant renderings and the bizarre contexts in which they are presented.
"Artifice can’t prevent you from making a complete fool of yourself. Even in a Balenciaga dress, there’s still a chance you might face-plant down a flight of stairs holding a glass of champagne. I guess embarrassment can be a real equalizer in that way."
Falling Woman equally embodies the jocular amalgam of art historical influences that infuse her contemporary narrative scenes. Replete with softly rendered edges and muted warm tones that emanate an internal luminosity, the present work immediately evokes the works of Dutch Masters. Weyant’s subject is further modeled in an intense chiaroscuro that accentuates the ruffles of her dress and the contours of her form against the stairs’ deep sepia. Conveying a facial expression strikingly reminiscent of Caravaggio’s Medusa, the woman comically flips the overexaggerated facial expression of the Baroque icon of feminine rage on its head to comic effect. The title of this work is a marked play on the notion of a “fallen woman” that constitutes a persistent motif throughout the history of art. Equally, however, Weyant finds nearer antecedents in the surrealistically provocative figuration of John Currin and Ellen Berkenbilt’s portraits of screaming women. Evincing such artistic inspirations, Falling Woman possesses an instantly recognizable style that intensifies the potently unsettling nature of the work. Simultaneously, the present work embodies the eclectic aesthetic vernacular the artist wields to masterfully articulate the multivalent emotions intrinsic to the experiences of young womanhood. A meticulous display of tragedy embedded with frivolity, Falling Woman wholly demonstrates Weyant’s genius capacity to convey dark humor through the medium of painting.
