Anna Wehrwein

Lives and works in Columbia, MO, USA

Artist statement

I make paintings and drawings that reimagine the domestic space as a site of creative action and communal agency. Within the established settings of home and garden, the women in the paintings—all of them friends and fellow artists—engage in manual and immersive tasks. They cut each other’s hair, give each other tattoos, and repot houseplants. These are scenes that, while based on real events, appear fictive, even utopian. Through the limited aperture of cinematic lens and painting precedent, intimate gestures and mise-en-scène may be interpreted as zones of maternal nurturing or eroticism. But this limited reading of madonna or harem is not so much inaccurate as unsatisfying. The figures themselves are not particularly concerned with how they are being looked at or by who. Instead, they are absorbed in drawing, watching, and listening—in what they are looking at.

Artwork