Anna Weyant (Calgary, 1995) will hold her first monographic exhibition in a museum this summer in Madrid. She was selling drawings on a beach towel in 2019; in 2022 they were already auctioning her paintings for more than a million dollars. What lies in between is part of the legend, or the algorithm. It’s also the story of how a painter with a baroque aesthetic and a gothic soul has managed to move in the global art landscape. Now, barely 30 years old, she lands at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza with her first monographic exhibition in a museum.
The show, curated by Guillermo Solana, is open from July 15 to October 12, 2025 and is part of the cycle dedicated to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen collection. Weyant presents 26 recent works, including canvases and paper, in a montage that puts his paintings in direct dialogue with historical pieces from the permanent collection. There are Balthus, Magritte or Mattia Preti, in a crossing of glances that enhances the symbolic charge and the dark echo of his painting.
The figure of Anna Weyant
Because that is what Weyant does: she paints the disturbing from the figurative, the intimate from a calculated distance. His characters seem to come out of a stagnant dream. There is in them something of surrealism filtered by American pop culture, something of Hopper, something of the sad memes of Tumblr. Specialized critics have also related it to the Baroque, to interwar art and to a clear feminist reading and influence.
Nor can the exhibition be understood without the context: Weyant is the youngest artist to have been signed by Gagosian, a megagallery of reference. She recently painted Kaia Gerber for the cover of Vogue and is already part of the celebrity art ecosystem. What comes to Madrid, in that sense, is a name that sounds and a work that intrigues.