Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin – Goethestraße 2/3
🗓️ On view through November 29, 2025
Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin hosts Mothers, a new exhibition by American painter Grace Weaver. This series, focusing on themes of motherhood, the body, and care, reminds us that the figure is not just a subject but also a “stage.” In Weaver’s paintings, bodies become spaces where lines dance with emotion.
In her large-scale canvases, maternal figures embrace their children—kneeling, bending, cradling, or simply standing. These scenes are serene yet dynamic: curving necks, elongated arms, intertwined bodies. Mothers and children, gazing at or away from each other, create a triangular relationship with the viewer. In some scenes, naked bodies close in on themselves with a protective instinct, evoking the shy, graceful poses of Eve or Aphrodite. In another, a mother’s arm wraps around her child’s body, blurring the boundary between color and line.
Weaver works on the floor, using watercolor-like paints and broad brushes on a black surface. Each movement is deliberate yet instinctive; brushstrokes curve as if dancing. The line between drawing and painting dissolves entirely in her canvases. Dripping paint spreads around the figures like a rhythmic breath. Her palette is soft and paper-like: inky blues, powder pinks, pale beiges. Weaver’s paintings feel almost like frescoes—completed in a single, irreversible breath.
In Mothers, Weaver draws inspiration from an ancient figure: a 5th-century BCE Boeotian statuette depicting a woman nursing her child. This initial spark expands into a broader exploration, referencing Cranach’s Madonnas, Egypt’s Isis and Horus sculptures, Cypriot sandstone figurines, Byzantine icons, and Greek “kourotrophos” statues. Yet Weaver strips these sources of their specific time and faith. Her maternal figures are not sacred but intimate, fragile, and deeply human.
Weaver’s exhibition approaches the mother-child theme with a distinct intuition, diverging from classical iconography while redefining the emotional weight of the figure. Each painting makes visible the quiet gestures of care and love, celebrating the ordinary over the sacred, the human over the mythic.
