Liana Z. Weber

Lives and works in Innsbruck, Austria

Artist statement

My practice interrogates inherited ideals of femininity through works on paper that merge personal narratives, cultural symbolism, and sacred imagery laced with satirical nuance. Rooted in Catholic tradition and shaped by the formidable matriarchs of my upbringing, I transform icons of purity and submission into audacious visions of autonomy. Positioning myself as subject, I construct a new archetype: a woman who is at once sumptuous and unyielding, piercing and playful. This figure resists the strictures of patriarchal expectation, insisting instead on complexity and self-possession. Humor becomes an edge in this resistance, puncturing reverence with irony and revealing how tradition can be both deeply formative and deeply absurd. My meticulously rendered drawings echo the polished surfaces of idealized femininity while simultaneously disrupting them through processes of layering, erasure, and revision. This aesthetic, which I term “pretty gritty realism,” embodies a beauty that resists compliance and embraces contradiction. The women who emerge within these works are not passive objects of the gaze but active agents of their own narratives. Sensual yet unruly, sacred yet irreverent, they embody femininity as a state of perpetual flux: paradoxical, resistant, and defiantly free.

Artwork