Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. While you marvel at the same conceptual painters who have recycled boredom for forty years, a young woman from Calgary has understood something essential about our era: beauty forgives nothing. Anna Weyant, born in 1995, paints young women who look like porcelain dolls caught in situations of unsettling banality. In doing so, she awakens ghosts we would prefer to let sleep.
Her path seems meticulously charted: Rhode Island School of Design, then the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, before settling in New York where she becomes a studio assistant while developing her own practice. Nothing spectacular, except that from her first solo exhibition in 2019 at 56 Henry, a gallery in the Lower East Side, collectors rushed in. Three years later, she joined Gagosian, becoming the youngest artist represented by this legendary gallery. One of her paintings, Falling Woman, reached 1.5 million euros at Sotheby’s auction in 2022. The market has spoken, but what interests me is what her paintings whisper.
The disturbing body
Anna Weyant works at the very heart of what Julia Kristeva named abjection in her foundational work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection published in 1980 [1]. According to Kristeva, the abject is neither subject nor object, but that troubled zone where boundaries collapse, where the familiar becomes monstrous. Look at Two Eileens (2022): two versions of the same young woman, one smiling, the other pensive, dressed in a crumpled slip, pressed against each other on a background as black as tar. This doubling is not simply narrative or surrealistic. It materializes the rupture according to Kristeva between the self and the other, that primitive separation we establish to build our identity.
Kristeva writes that the abject marks the moment when we separated from the mother, when we began to recognize a boundary between the self and the other. With Weyant, this separation never truly took place. Her young women seem trapped in this pre-objectal state, that archaic space where identity remains fluid and dangerously unstable. In Falling Woman (2020), the protagonist falls backward on a stairway, mouth wide open, breasts prominent. Is she falling, laughing, screaming, or enjoying herself? The image refuses to settle on a single interpretation. It oscillates between the comic and the tragic, between endured violence and chosen freedom.
This ambiguity is not a flaw but the very signature of the abject as Kristeva conceives it. The abject, she writes, is above all ambiguity. It does not radically break with what threatens the subject but recognizes a perpetual danger. Weyant’s characters live in this state of permanent and gentle threat. They are never safe, but they do not run away either. They remain, suspended in domestic interiors that resemble golden prisons.
Take Lily (2021), this still life that juxtaposes a white lily and a revolver wrapped in a golden ribbon. The abject object par excellence, the instrument of death, is adorned with the attributes of seduction. It becomes a gift, an offering, a promise. Kristeva emphasizes that the abject attracts us as much as it repels us. Weyant’s revolver, wrapped like a birthday present, perfectly embodies this repulsive fascination. It transforms violence into ornament, death into a still life.
Weyant’s palette reinforces this sensation of domestic abjection. Her dark greens, dusty pinks, and deep blacks evoke the sepia tones of old photographs, but also that particular hue of sick flesh, the body beginning to decompose. Kristeva associates the abject with the materiality of death, with this traumatic confrontation with our own finitude. The corpse, she writes, seen without God and outside of science, represents the ultimate abjection. It is death infecting life.
Weyant’s young women possess precisely this cadaverous quality. Their skin appears porcelain, smooth and cold like dolls that have lived too long. They are beautiful in the manner of 17th-century Dutch still lifes, with that beauty that already smells of decay. In Venus (2022), two images of the tennis player Venus Williams face each other, rendered in deep browns. One looks towards us, the other looks away. The doubling creates discomfort, a feeling of uncanny strangeness.
This strangeness arises precisely because Weyant refuses to let her subjects rest in pure objectification. They resist becoming mere objects of desire or aesthetic contemplation. Kristeva notes that the abject resists assimilation, that it remains irreducible to the symbolic. Weyant’s characters inhabit this space of resistance. They look at us without truly seeing us, lost in their own thoughts, their own miniature dramas.
The artist stated in an interview: “I think we are more sensitive, or more protective, towards the parts of ourselves we try to hide, the places where we feel shame, perhaps in rage, grief, loss of control. There is intimacy, tenderness, or delicacy, where we are most monstrous” [2]. This sentence perfectly sums up the project at work in her painting. Monstrosity is not external, spectacular, gothic in the traditional sense. It is intimate, domestic, and hidden in the folds of normality.
Emma (2022) illustrates this gentle monstrosity. A young woman dressed in a black jumpsuit sits while another half-visible figure strokes her hair. The seated woman has only one eye. This mutilation, however, does not produce the expected horror. The embrace rather suggests sisterly love, a tenderness that acknowledges and embraces the flaw. Kristeva might write that this image refuses phobia, that primitive reaction to the abject, to propose instead an almost serene acceptance of the incomplete.
Weyant’s still lifes function according to the same logic. It Must Have Been Love (2022) presents two flower vases on a dining table, seen from different angles. The flowers, cut from their roots, are already dead but not yet wilted. They occupy that liminal space, that threshold between life and death that Kristeva identifies as the privileged territory of the abject. The still life, nature morte in French, still life in English, carries within it this contradiction. It stops life to better contemplate it, creating a petrified moment of beauty.
Weyant pushes this logic even further in certain works where she literally beheads flowers or shows them dying. The artist transforms the still life into a botanical crime scene. The violence becomes formal, aesthetic, almost abstract. But it remains violence. Kristeva notes that primitive societies marked a specific area of their culture to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animality, imagined as representatives of sex and murder. Weyant brings these repressed elements back into the most civilized domestic space there is: the dining room, the living room, the bedroom.
Her use of chiaroscuro recalls the Dutch masters of the 17th century, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Judith Leyster, but the meaning has changed. For the Dutch, light often came from God, revealing divine truth in the material world. For Weyant, the light isolates subjects in black voids, cutting them off from any reassuring context. It is theatrical, even cinematographic light, which dramatizes without explaining. It creates mystery rather than clarity.
This theatrical approach strengthens the effect of abjection. Kristeva speaks of the abject as that which disturbs identity, the system, the order. That which does not respect boundaries, positions, rules. Weyant’s paintings disturb precisely because they refuse to conform to expectations. They resemble classical figurative painting, borrowing the codes of conventional beauty, but they let slip something incorrect, misplaced, vaguely nauseating. The revolver with its ribbon. The young woman falling. The doubles that should not exist.
The artist creates what we might call a “middle-class abjection.” No spurting blood, no roaring monsters. Just well-dressed young women in well-kept interiors, and yet something is wrong. This approach is infinitely more disturbing than explicit horror. It suggests that the abject is not hidden in society’s margins but at the very center of our daily lives. In our homes, our relationships, our bodies.
Kristeva associates the abject with enjoyment as much as fear. Weyant’s paintings constantly play with this boundary between pleasure and displeasure, between attraction and repulsion. Head (2020), this close-up on a curved chest suggesting a fellation, perfectly illustrates this ambivalence. The image is both erotic and uncomfortable, alluring and slightly absurd. It reduces the female body to a fragment, but this fragment resists total objectification by its very strangeness.
Feminine gothic
The other tradition that haunts Anna Weyant’s work is that of the female gothic, the literary subgenre that emerged in the 18th century with Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, and Mary Wollstonecraft. These authors used the framework of the gothic novel, with its unsettling castles, secret passages, persecuted heroines, to explore the female condition in an oppressive patriarchal society. Weyant transposes this tradition into contemporary middle-class America, replacing castles with suburban houses and aristocratic tyrants with insidious social conventions.
The artist mentioned her fascination with the illustrated Madeline books, those stories of a little French orphan in a Parisian boarding school. Ludwig Bemelmans’ books, published from 1939 onwards, depict a superficially charming but fundamentally dark world. Madeline lives without parents, undergoes an appendectomy, braves dangers with a disturbing carefreeness. Weyant owned Madeline dolls as a child and based her first series of paintings on these figurines. She wondered: what would happen if these dolls grew up a bit, if they entered adolescence with all its confusion and trauma?
This question places her directly in the tradition of female gothic. As many literary critics have noted, female gothic focuses on the passage from adolescence to adulthood, on that perilous moment when the young girl must negotiate her entry into a male-dominated world. The heroines of Radcliffe, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë navigate domestic spaces that become prisons, places of danger rather than safety. Weyant’s characters occupy similar spaces.
Girl Crying at a Party perfectly captures this feeling of social alienation that female gothic has always explored. The traditional gothic heroine always feels slightly out of sync, never quite at home in the social structures surrounding her. She observes the world with a mixture of fascination and horror. Weyant’s young women carry that same gaze. They are physically present but mentally absent, lost in their own daydreams or nightmares.
The artist has stated that she is obsessed with the period of adolescence, with that dramatic and traumatic phase between childhood and adulthood [3]. Female gothic has always privileged this liminality. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre begins as an abused orphan and ends as a married woman, but the heart of the novel lies in that intermediate zone of uncertainty and transformation. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights Catherine oscillates between two identities, unable to choose between nature and culture, savagery and civilization.
Weyant paints post-modern gothic heroines who have internalized these conflicts. They do not flee haunted castles but their own expectations and desires. Loose Screw (2020) shows a female figure in silhouette, mouth wide open in what could be a scream or a laugh. The title suggests that something is not right, that the machine of normative femininity has a manufacturing flaw.
Female gothic has always used the supernatural as a metaphor for the constraints imposed on women. Ghosts represent suppressed voices, doubles symbolize fragmented identities, castles embody patriarchal structures. Weyant does not need literal ghosts because her characters are already spectral. Their porcelain skin, their frozen poses, their vacant stare make them creatures halfway between life and death.
This spectral quality is enhanced by her technique. Weyant paints in thin, smooth layers, creating surfaces almost too perfect. Her characters appear varnished, sealed under a transparent protective layer. This technique recalls that of Victorian miniature painters who painted portraits of recently deceased people, turning the dead into precious objects to be kept. Weyant’s young women have that same preserved quality, as if they had been taxidermied at the moment of their greatest beauty.
The motif of the doll runs throughout her work and constitutes a direct link with the Gothic tradition. Dolls in Gothic literature are always unsettling. They represent humanity emptied of its content, form without essence. Freud analyzed the doll as an example of Unheimlich, that eerie strangeness that arises when the familiar suddenly becomes threatening. A doll looks like a human but is not one. It inhabits that blurry space between animate and inanimate.
Weyant literally worked with dolls, photographing and painting them. But even her living models take on doll-like qualities. Their round faces, large eyes, static poses evoke figurines rather than people. It is understood that the artist is attracted to these characteristics, roundness, stillness, artificial perfection. She thus creates Gothic heroines who are their own prisons. They are not imprisoned in castles but in their own bodies, in the conventions of female beauty.
Summertime (2021) depicts a woman whose head and torso rest on a table next to a vase of flowers. The composition suggests that she herself is part of the still life, that she has become a decorative object just like the flowers. This objectification is a central concern of female Gothic since its origins. Radcliffe’s heroines are constantly at risk of being transformed into objects: forcibly married, imprisoned, or murdered for their inheritance.
Weyant updates these dangers for the Instagram era. Her young women are not threatened by greedy barons but by the pressure to present themselves as perfect images. They must transform into dolls, objects of contemplation. The danger comes from within as much as from outside. Bite (2020) shows a young woman wearing sunglasses biting what appears to be a man’s arm. It is a moment of rebellion, a Gothic heroine who attacks rather than flees.
This dimension of resistance distinguishes female Gothic from male Gothic. In Matthew Lewis or Horace Walpole, the heroines are often purely victims. In Radcliffe and her heirs, they deploy survival strategies, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic. Weyant’s characters also resist, but obliquely. They refuse to smile for the camera, they look away, they fall down stairs holding their champagne.
Female Gothic also explores sexuality in a way that the realistic novel could not at the time. The veil of the supernatural allowed for addressing otherwise unspeakable desires and fears. Weyant uses the veil of formal strangeness for a similar effect. Eileen (2022) shows a young woman raising her arms behind her head, pulling up her white tunic to reveal her panties. The gesture is both innocent and sexually charged, spontaneous and posed.
The artist has spoken about her interest in vintage Playboy, not for its explicit erotic content but for its synthetic aesthetic and dark atmosphere. She likes big blond hair and “really big bulbous breasts” but treats them with an irony that prevents them from becoming purely objectifying. Her women do not pose for male pleasure. They are caught in their own inner worlds, indifferent to the viewer’s gaze.
This indifference is important. Radcliffe’s gothic heroines are constantly watched, observed, and spied upon. They only find freedom in moments when they escape surveillance. Weyant’s characters seem to have internalized this surveillance; we see them, but they do not see us. They are both exposed and withdrawn, visible and inaccessible. This tension creates a productive unease. We are voyeurs of an intimacy that excludes us.
House Exterior (2023) presents a three-story wooden house, apparently empty, lit in a claustrophobic way that generates strong psychological tension. The image immediately evokes Norman Bates’s house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or the Blackwood sisters’ residence in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Weyant confirms these references, citing Jackson and Hitchcock as influences. The gothic house is a character in its own right, a space that contains and expresses its inhabitants’ traumas.
The title of her first solo exhibition, “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” referenced both her paintings of dollhouses and Todd Solondz’s film about the cruelties of adolescence. The exhibition showcased miniature interiors inhabited by young women in distress. The dollhouse functions as a domesticated version of the gothic castle, an enclosed, controlled space where dramas unfold on a smaller scale. As literary critic Susan Stewart observed, the dollhouse is the most accomplished miniature, representing on a small scale the articulation of tension between interior and exterior spheres, between exteriority and interiority.
Weyant transforms her canvases into psychological dollhouses. Her black backgrounds eliminate all external context, creating purely interior spaces where characters float in their own worlds. This suppression of social context is typical of female gothic. Normal society disappears, leaving the heroine alone with her tormentors or her own inner demons. Sophie (2022) shows a young woman standing and smiling in the darkness. Her jovial expression contrasts so violently with the black background that it becomes unsettling rather than comforting.
The moral ambiguity of the female gothic also permeates Weyant’s work. In Radcliffe’s novels, we never truly know who is good and who is evil until the end. Appearances constantly deceive. Similarly, Weyant’s characters resist simple moral interpretation. Are they victims or accomplices? Innocent or calculating? Fragile or dangerous? The artist refuses to decide. She keeps her figures in a state of productive ambiguity.
This ambiguity extends to her still lifes. Drawing for Lily (2021) presents an elegant vase, a cream pot with a spoon, and a revolver with a ribbon wrapped around the trigger and barrel. Innocent domestic objects sit alongside the instrument of death. Critic John Elderfield noted that this drawing finds the right balance between tranquility and unease, unlike the more static still lifes of the exhibition. Ordinary objects become carriers of diffuse threats.
The female gothic excels at transforming the ordinary into the menacing. Daily domestic life proves to be full of hidden dangers. Charlotte Brontë’s heroines must negotiate dangers in drawing rooms and dining rooms as much as in secret passages. Weyant updates this truth for the 21st century. Her young women move in an apparently safe world, well-kept houses, neat clothing, and fresh flowers, but this world contains silent violences.
The artist describes her still lifes as her “happy place,” a refuge where she can practice painting from life [4]. But these happy spaces are infiltrated by the strange and threatening. This infiltration recalls the central strategy of female Gothic: showing how the structures meant to protect women, marriage, family, and home, can become traps. Weyant’s flowers are cut, dying, sometimes decapitated. Domestic beauty masks violence.
Her palette contributes to this Gothic atmosphere. Dark greens, dirty yellows, faded pinks evoke decrepit Victorian interiors, moldy tapestries, portraits blackened by time. These colors carry the weight of history, suggesting that contemporary domestic spaces are haunted by previous generations of women who lived and suffered there. Female Gothic is always haunted by dead mothers, mad aunts, and missing sisters. Weyant paints their heirs.
Her smooth and refined technique creates a visual paradox. The images resemble advertisements for luxury products, that icy perfection of high-end fashion magazines. But the content subverts this perfection. A young woman falling. Dying flowers. Ribboned revolvers. Weyant uses the aesthetic of commodification to critique commodification itself. Her Gothic heroines are trapped not in castles but in images, in expectations, in prescribed roles.
To exist in a space of uncertainty
Anna Weyant creates a new form of Gothic painting for the era of social media. Her heroines inhabit a liminal space, neither fully alive nor fully dead, neither entirely innocent nor completely corrupt, neither clearly victims nor evidently powerful. They exist in the in-between, that space of uncertainty our era finds particularly hard to tolerate. We want clear judgments or definitive interpretations. Weyant refuses to give them to us.
This resistance to certainty constitutes her most radical gesture. In a world saturated with instantly decoded images, her paintings remain opaque. They require time, attention, a willingness to accept ambiguity. They borrow the language of conventional beauty but speak a strange dialect. They look like dolls but think like human beings. They occupy domestic interiors but perhaps dream of escape.
Her use of the Dutch pictorial tradition is not a simple postmodern citation. It is a claim to the right to paint slowly, carefully, with attention to detail that may seem anachronistic. In a world of instant digital images, she opposes the patience of oil on canvas, successive glazes, the progressive construction of illusion. This slowness is itself a form of resistance.
But she does not fall into nostalgia. Her subjects are decidedly contemporary, young women in modern underwear, current objects, references to popular culture. She paints her time while using the tools of the past. This productive tension generates much of the power of her work. She proves that figurative painting can still have something urgent to say about our present condition.
Her youth places her in a unique position. She belongs to the generation that grew up with Instagram, that viscerally understands the pressure to present oneself as a perfect image. But she has also seriously studied art history, immersed herself in pictorial traditions. She can thus critique image culture from the inside while mobilizing age-old visual strategies.
Critics who accuse her of playing the safe card miss the point. It is true that her paintings are not violently experimental in their form. They do not break representation, do not fragment space, do not scream their modernity. But this formal restraint is precisely what allows their strange content to creep in. If the images were more openly disturbing, we could easily reject them. Their superficial beauty draws us in, then traps us.
Weyant works within the tradition of painters who use visual seduction to convey uncomfortable messages. John Currin, whom she cites as a major influence, does the same. Lisa Yuskavage as well. But she brings her own sensibility, her own perspective as a young woman observing the rituals of femininity with a mix of tenderness and horror. She paints from within the experience she represents, and that makes all the difference.
The future will tell if she can maintain this productive tension, if she can continue to paint the abject and the gothic without falling into repetition or complacency. For now, with less than a decade of professional career behind her, she has already created a body of work that deserves attention and analysis. She has found a singular path through the minefields of contemporary figurative painting.
Her paintings remind us that beauty can be dangerous, that domestic interiors hide violence, that young women who look like dolls have complex and dark thoughts. They also remind us that painting, this ancient and patient art, can still surprise us, disturb us, force us to look more closely at what we thought we already knew. Anna Weyant paints surfaces that demand to be pierced, appearances that conceal abysses.
- Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection , Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1980.
- Ayanna Dozier, “Anna Weyant’s Uncanny Paintings Breathe New Life into Female Portraiture”, Artsy, December 20, 2022
- Sasha Bogojev, “Anna Weyant Welcomes Us to the Dollhouse”, Juxtapoz Magazine, January 2020
- John Elderfield, “Seductive Imitation: on Anna Weyant’s Still Lifes”, Gagosian Quarterly, August 17, 2023
