Anna Wehrwein
Watering
Oil on Canvas
40 x 32 in
2023
May 2-30, 2025, Main Gallery - “What Grows”
The paintings in “What Grows” take us into a lush, but ever changing garden. The garden is a site of containment, but also wildness. It is a liminal space between interior and exterior, home and nature, arrangement and chance. In these recent oil and acrylic paintings, the garden is 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.
From their grounds, these paintings grew in new and surprising ways. Starting from gestural color fields, I built the imagery both on top of and in response to the energetic and unsteady surface. Unexpected shapes, hue, and light sources emerge in spaces that feel both absorbent and barely there. The figures come in and out of focus, at times blending in with each other or merging into the foliage.
The people in the paintings are engaged in acts of tending. From container, to courtyard, raised bed to forest, these gardeners (and artists) are in the process of arranging color and life, sharing knowledge, and redrawing the boundaries of home. To paint is also to tend to. It is a labor of attention that asks us to consider what’s before us and what’s beyond, and to share it with those around us.
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.