Mary Weatherford Brings ‘Fear and Beauty’ to Venice


VENICE — The kind of gruesome painting that makes you want to avert your eyes: Titian’s “The Swim of Marsyas” depicts a satyr – half human, half goat – hanging upside down, skinning alive while a dog sucks his blood and a musician plays the violin indifferently.

But artist Mary Weatherford wanted to continue the search.

Fascinated by the work after seeing it in Antonio Paolucci’s “Tiziano” exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome nearly a decade ago, Los Angeles-based Weatherford decided one day to make a work based on the painting. Now, how is this It opened Wednesday at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani as the Venice Biennale begins – featuring 12 new canvases that Weatherford produced between January and March 2021.

“I thought it was the worst painting I had ever seen,” Weatherford said in an interview at the palazzo. “Marsyas has resigned to his fate. My affairs have been dealing with fate since 1986. I am interested in choosing whether to turn left or right.”

Dressed simply in a black sweater and ripped jeans, her straight hair parted in the middle, she might look more understated than the spritz-drinking art fashionistas who filled the Weatherford Giardini. But at 59, with prominent galleries behind her – Gagosian and David Kordansky – Weatherford represents something quite rare in today’s overheated contemporary art market: a middle-aged, mid-career female artist who is slowly, quietly, gaining her share of fame.

“Mary is like one of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Ladies of the Canyon’,” Kordansky said, referring to the song about an ensemble of artists and musicians. “He’s totally, totally smart and unaffected by trends. He is always doing his own thing.”

This “thing” makes lyrical abstract paintings, often punctuated by neon sticks, currently in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Tate in London. up to $450,000 at auction in 2018. That year, critic Roberta Smith, writes in The New York TimesBernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. He was called ‘ecstatic works, pierced by beams of light, resembling her Theresa’.

Weatherford is at the Aspen Museum of Art and Art Gallery in 2020 alongside surveys at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, and at SITE Santa Fe, NM. LAXART in Los Angeles. “Mary is dissatisfied at best,” said Tang’s manager, Ian Berry. “A researcher who studies art history, science, architecture, and gender.”

Those familiar with his work comment on Weatherford’s technical precision – the special linen he uses for his canvases, the gestural nature of the brushstrokes, the gesso layering.

“There’s something very special about how he applies the paint,” said Nicola Lees, director of the Aspen museum. “She has such a fun feature, but very sensitive.”

While Weatherford’s paintings often feature swirls of colour, Marsyas’s work, which can be seen through November 27, is shadowy and somber with predominant hues of black, grey, violet and silver.

“It’s a cut in your vision,” Weatherford said, while neon slashes act as “a cut in your vision.”

With the painting of Titian, typically found in the Archbishop’s Palace in Kromeriz, Czech Republic, he wanted to ponder the tough questions that Marsyas had posed when he invited Apollo to a music competition and knew he would lose and pay a terrible price.

“Is Marsyas ignorant or arrogant?” he asked. “What is the difference between ignorance and arrogance?”

Weatherford is often philosophical in conversation. In an unpretentious, approachable demeanor, he refers to the films “The Godfather” by writers Iris Murdoch, Haruki Murakami and Leo Tolstoy and “Un Chien Andalou” by Luis Buñuel.

Born in 1963 in Ojai, California, where his father was pastor of a small Episcopal church, Weatherford has been making art since weaving macrame with his mother at the kitchen table. It fell a lot into museums on a school trip to LACMA. “I loved the smell, I loved the sound,” he said, “I loved everything about them.”

In particular, van Gogh’s “wheat field with crows” because the menacing sky and flying birds. “I thought to myself, ‘OK, I’ll have to figure out why this is a scary picture.’”

Weatherford, an undergraduate at Princeton University, traveled to New York to see art, visiting the galleries of Holly Solomon, Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper, and Paula Cooper. annina nose. Thinking he needed to pursue something “practical”, he planned to major in architecture when he started a professor-taught painting course. Jerry Buchanan it changed everything. “I was an immediate conversion,” he said.

After college, Weatherford joined Whitney’s museum studies program. Meanwhile, she drew and attended art classes in her Upper West Side studio apartment.

In 1990, The Times titled Weatherford: “Fresh, Hot, and Fame-Driven Faces These Are The Faces To Watch

“His determination to transform abstract painting into a crossover art form is full of possibilities, feeding it both a feminist consciousness and references to the performing arts filled with feminine stereotypes,” Smith wrote.

Weatherford said she wasn’t ready for the incoming attention. Back in California, he taught at UCLA and the Otis College of Art and Design, but “I couldn’t paint and teach,” he said. “Teaching would take a lot out of me.”

So he worked as an accountant for a living—first for the Santa Monica Museum of Art and then for artist Mike Kelley. “I love accounting because it’s like a chemical equation,” Weatherford said. “I love astrophysics.”

He likened it to playing roulette, working in an office four days a week and at an easel the other three days. “I shifted all the chips to one number,” he said. “I always chose to take the time to make the paintings.”

Weatherford said the 2012 exhibition at the Todd Madigan Art Gallery at California State University in Bakersfield “changed everything” and garnered more attention from critics and collectors.

Describing it as Dan Flavin’s acquaintance with art collector David Gersh’s Helen Frankenthaler, along with his wife, Susan, who owns one of Weatherford’s works, the artist said the artist had “developed his own vocabulary”.

Yet, as it now seems, Weatherford’s art career wasn’t really something he planned or could count on. “I only started selling paintings when I was 50,” said the artist, “I just want to be a good painter.”

“It feels good to be at this age because I’m not worried about it going away and I’m wondering how I’m going to make a living,” she continued. “If young people have success, it’s a ghost.”

The late success has also given him the freedom to not worry about staying popular or pleasing audiences. Komal Shah, The artist, who sits on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and collects Weatherford’s work, said he admires the artist’s continued challenge. “Joan Mitchell is getting an obvious heir,” Shah said. “Success did not come easy to her and she established herself as a gravitas painter.”

Part of what drew Weatherford to the Titian painting was that it suddenly pulled and pushed, embodying the often painful complexity of life. He tried to capture this nuance in his works such as “Below the Cliff” and “Light Falling Like a Broken Chain”, both of which are in the movie. a Kordansky show in 2021. “It is a marriage of supreme fear and beauty,” he said. “It’s like going up the river.”

Weatherford said that if there’s an underlying darkness to his work, it’s because there’s a persistent sadness in the world. “It’s fleeting and I can’t stop time,” he said. “Even in Venice, I look out the window at a boat passing by and think, ‘This is the only time we’ll ever see this boat go by.’”



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