Anna Weyant exhibition

A young woman with an absent expression, a room that seems to float outside time, a domestic scene that does not quite fit. Anna Weyant does not paint the obvious. Her universe, now arriving in Madrid for the first time, consists of images that seem gentle at first glance but are laden with irony, melancholy and latent tension. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents more than twenty works by the artist born in Calgary in 1995, in an exhibition that moves away from formulas and explores the emotional, the dark and the beautiful. Weyant constructs scenes where the everyday mingles with the strange, as though the paintings were frozen just before — or just after — an invisible event. Her protagonists, almost always women, do not pose: they exist. Sometimes they hide, at other times they confront the viewer, and almost always they seem to inhabit a different reality, outside time and conventional narrative rules. Far from becoming merely aesthetic, her works engage with references ranging from the Baroque to the 1930s, while still filtering in pop influences and almost cinematic details. But nothing in Weyant is nostalgia. Her painting does not quote: it transforms. Installed in the museum's Sala de Exposiciones Temporales, the exhibition forms part of the series linked to the Blanca y Borja Thyssen collection, and also offers an interplay of visual echoes with certain works in the permanent collection. Admission is free with the museum's general admission ticket. An opportunity to discover an artist who, without raising her voice, is charting her own course in contemporary art. And whose images, once seen, are difficult to forget.