07/04/2022
On the night artist Anna Weyant’s work debuted at the auction house Christie’s, the 27-year-old painter was too nervous to attend or even watch the livestream. Instead, she holed up in her small New York apartment until a friend texted with news.
Her portrait of a woman with long, flowing hair that she had sold for around $12,000 two years before, resold for $1.5 million in May, five times its high estimate.
“People kept congratulating me,” Weyant tells WSJ. Magazine of the sale, but it didn’t put her at ease. “All I felt was pressure.“
It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Weyant—and far from her unassuming start in Calgary, Canada. Spotted on Instagram three years ago and quickly vouched for by a savvy handful of artists, dealers and advisers, she is now internationally coveted for her paintings of vulnerable girls and mischievous women in sharply lit, old-master hues.
Weyant’s oeuvre of roughly 50 paintings has already filtered into the hands of top collectors. Demand for her art outstrips her supply: The waiting list to buy one of her paintings, dealers say, is at least 200 names long. And in May she teamed up with the biggest art gallery of them all, Gagosian.
Back in 2019, her drawings, laid out on a beach towel at a Hamptons art fair, were selling for around $400 apiece.
In May, each of New York’s three major auction houses included one of Weyant’s works in their high-profile evening sales for the first time. All three works surpassed their auction estimates by multiples. Her record is a 2020 portrait that sold at Sotheby’s for $1.6 million, eight times its high estimate.
Read more: https://on.wsj.com/3uo20au
