In her striking portrayals of the tragicomic everyday, Grace Weaver examines the charged social and cultural conditions that underlie self-concept, intimacy, and individual experience. Depicting elastic-limbed, Mannerist figures that arrange themselves before mirrors and collide on street-corners with an unrelenting air of exuberance, her works contend with what she terms the “theater of public life.” In Weaver’s paintings, body becomes scenario: playful, sweeping lines and dense planes of luminous color act as linguistic elements, each directing its own physical weight and affect onto her female subjects. In Weaver’s paintings, psychological narratives are suggested with an economy of expression—through the sideways tilt of a glance, the subtle curl of a lip, or the droopy slouch of a shoulder. Occupied with observations of self-conscious performativity and awkward aspirationalism, her work is grounded in an insistent empathy with her subjects. The protagonists in Weaver’s solitary female portraits are not necessarily drawn from life—rather, the artist considers them archetypes of feminine self-presentation. They are pictured in once-private spaces of preparation—the kitchen, the vanity mirror—that have become semi-public.