Sarah Ann Weber employs painting and drawing to create overgrown landscapes that are both verdant and putrefied, while confounding traditional expectations of the landscape genre. Rather than replicating the surface details of our natural surroundings, Weber’s marvelous evocations of nature concern themselves with the spiritual essence of the world, decentralizing the figure. By choreographing vegetation through her imaginative stylizations, the artist proposes that psychological and emotional worlds are as complex and as ripe for exploration as the one beyond our bodies. Weber’s all-over composition style results in works that are deliriously vibrant and feral, uncovering dualities of nature—as a source of beauty and innocence, equally entwined with aggression, and indifference.
Sarah Ann Weber(b. 1988, Chicago, IL) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Weber has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at venues including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; 12.26, Dallas, TX; Club Pro, Los Angeles, CA; and The Franklin, Chicago, IL. Selected group exhibitions include Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; MAUVE Gallery, Vienna, Austria; Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn; Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Nord/Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin; Locust Projects, Miami; and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. In 2023 Weber will be an Artist-in-Residence at Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL and is preparing for a solo exhibition at SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Sarah Ann Weber’s show almost reads as an extended version of Sir John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, albeit with more psychedelia. In one work, I would give you some violets (2022), a blue skeleton lays on its back amid a menagerie of foliage. —William Saradet
Beauty remains an uncomfortable territory for many contemporary artists, which makes the boldness of Sarah Ann Weber’s aesthetics all the more compelling. — Daniel Gerwin
Florals become a maximalist patina that engulf the artworks in"Strong Blossoming Thing Forever." The female figures set into these edge-to-edge tropical motifs are lithe and stoic, like classical sculptures pulled out of art history texts. — Lindsay Preston Zappas
Strong Blossoming Thing Forever, An Exhibition of New Works
Rather than replicating the surface details of our environment, Weber’s marvelous evocations of nature concern themselves with the spiritual essence of the world, decentralizing the figure, while treating landscape as something of a fairy tale character in itself.
Weber indulges in a vein of focused, maximal surreality throughout. If not cartoons, Weber’s varying, vibrant Prismacolor forms and tones seem at least to have their roots in the rich values of an analog television image, one playing nature docs and gardening shows on a loop. — Aaron Horst
Bursting with color and alien shapes, Sarah Ann Weber’s mixed-media works use colored pencil and sometimes watercolor to create scenes that are densely populated with surreal plants and ghostly figures. —Shannon Lee
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The Los Angeles-based artist [Sarah Anne Weber] works primarily with watercolor and colored pencil on paper, as in this recent work on offer at LA’s Anat Ebgi Gallery. Focusing on floral, exotic, and invented organic forms, she bestows her compositions with a distinct sense of psychedelic dreaminess that combines ’70s nostalgia with our culture’s current obsession with all things witchy. —Eileen Kinsella
"Although my artwork has never been overtly political, I work intuitively and from an emotional place, so my practice is undoubtedly affected by how I feel about everything that is going on in the world." —Sarah Ann Weber
More Must See Los Angeles Shows | Jason Bailer Losh & Sarah Ann Weber
Now on view at Anat Ebgi are two not-to-miss shows. The first is “Three Holes in a Parachute”—Jason Bailer Losh’s newest body of work, informed by a skillset of carpentry and craftsmanship passed down to Losh by his father. The second is Sarah Ann Weber’s “Tropical Disease”—an exhibition of new drawings influenced by the artist’s memories, family archives, and the nature of California. —Pearl Fontaine
"By creating environments, I am able to explore gender, decoration and beauty. Focusing on the floral and exotic, my highly detailed, dense compositions become places where growth and entropy, figure and ground, intertwine." —Sarah Ann Weber
Sarah Ann Weber: Scenic View at Club Pro, Los Angeles
The color pencil drawings are the true revelations of an already-strong show. These quite large works on paper choreograph a deeply impossible amount of detail and are nothing short of breathtaking in their strange riots of omnivorous beauty. Though on paper these are in no way sketches or preparations for the canvases; rather they are their counterparts, fully realized unto themselves. —Shana Nys Dambrot