Grace Weaver has always balanced her work around performance and figuration. The strokes on her paintings were always like an exercise, as she told us in her cover story a few years back, "My big painting hero, though, will always be Alex Katz. He has developed a way of painting in which the figure is almost secondary to muscular brushwork and stylization. He’s kind of the big one for me, the ideal that I’m always chasing." For her new show, 11 Women, on view now at James Cohan Gallery in NYC, Weaver has taken scale and movement to her own personal best level. 

As the gallery notes, "For her third exhibition at James Cohan, Weaver has created eleven paintings of monumentally-scaled women. Expressively executed in thick oil paint, the figures are arrested mid-stride as they navigate the hazards of city streets, their dynamic limbs rendered in pink against asphalt grounds. At once heroic and awkward, sturdy yet precarious, brutal but tender, her subjects contend with what it is to be a woman moving through—and taking up—space."