Grace Weaver – Laundry at Soy Capitán

In her fourth solo exhibition at Soy Capitán Laundry – Grace Weaver presents a series of new paintings that continue her interest in painting’s potential to capture the strange poetics of the everyday. Similar to the Language poetry of Bernadette Mayer, in which nothing is too trivial for the honor of inclusion, Weaver’s visual “enchanted mundanity” represents the tedium of daily routines through acts of repetition, variation and visual description, thereby creating a state of hyperattention on the unmonumental moments of everyday life. 

The paintings often begin with a quotidian object, activity or interaction and usually depict a variant or model of the modern woman who isn’t necessarily Weaver herself, but perhaps reflects, as Weaver says, surrogates of surrogates of surrogates of herself, as she walks, runs, runs errands, shops, chats or cleans.

dirty laundry and other homely items

If the woman in the image is a modified and alienated version of the artist, the painting’s seemingly trivial themes – in this exhibition, laundry – undergo a similar estrangement: dirty laundry and other homely items lie as abstract blobs of color or simple geometric forms on the surface of the painting, devoid of detail and depth, as if the reality of time and space stopped right in this hyperreal moment of humdrum housework.

Through their warped perspectives and theatrical compositions, Weaver’s paintings transform and compress the unspectacular moment of daily life into specters of strange familiarity. As the poet Lyn Hejinian writes: “The quotidian consists not of things but of effects playing over the surfaces of things; it is not beings but a way of being.” 

Text by Sophia Rohwetter, read the full article here.

Please feel also warmly invited to the soft opening of Soy Capitán passage – the gallery’s second space located in Charlottenburg. For the inauguration we will present new works by Grace Weaver to accompany her exhibition Laundry in the gallery space in Kreuzberg.

Join us for drinks on Saturday, 16 September 2023, from 2–6 pm at the Soy Capitán passage!