Anna Wehrwein

May 2-30, 2025,  Main Gallery

I make paintings and drawings that reimagine the domestic space and painting tableau as a site of creative action and communal agency.They are dense fields of color and bodies that intertwine painting history, personal narrative, and abstraction, within a framework of a feminist utopia. Within this space, care can take on many forms and intimacy comes from both touch and time.

I use drawing as both subject and metaphor in an ongoing series on Color-Aid paper.There is an urgency to these drawings— a need to mark, to saturate, to understand an image or a feeling. Wet and dry media are combined on the colored ground in idiosyncratic ways that both describe and obscure. In many, the figure is engaged in the act of drawing or making, positioning them as another version of author and viewer. And while a the fast moving hand of the contour drawer creates the energy in these works, it’s the slow looking of close friendships that sets the tone.

In my most recent paintings, I have been exploring the idea of garden space.The garden is a site of containment, but also wildness. It is a liminal space between interior and exterior, home and nature. I am interested in the garden as a metaphorical and psychic space, but also as a visual and optical field of textures, colors, and patterns that can feel both abstract and decorative. But most significantly, the paintings consider the garden as a social space in which care and nurturing can take on many forms.

In both the drawings and paintings, I am interested in the dynamics of watching and the act of looking as having the potential to be active and reciprocal: to not just look at someone, but with someone.To read over their shoulder—and in turn—let my viewer do the same.And yet, there is always a gap in understanding. Like in the drawings and paintings, the illusion of completeness gives way to material and brushstroke: the colored ground always shows through.Together, these works are about yearning to find intimacies— of view, of people, of mark-making.They are about closeness and touch and finding a shared place for drawing and watching and thinking.

Anna Wehrwein is an artist originally from the Boston area. She received her BS in Art and BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Tennessee. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Friend of the Artist, West Branch Literary Journal and ArtMaze Magazine. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg (New York, NY), Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) Collar Works (Troy, NY), and Troost Gardens (Kansas City, MO). She has been an artist in residence at The Cloud House, VCCA, Vermont Studio Center, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MacDowell, for which she was awarded the 2019 Josephine Mercy Heathcote Fellowship. She currently lives in Columbia, MO where she is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Missouri and the co-founder/director of stop-gap projects. 

Host or Publisher Kansas City Artists Coalition