We are delighted to announce our formal representation of Charlott Weise!

Often described by the artist as ‘forms of intuitive visual writings’, throughout Charlott’s practice visual idioms corralled from literature, the urban world and fashion as well as the history of art collide in fluid narratives. Rather than steadfast scenarios however, the semi-abstracted forms within her scenes unfold as gestural prompts; allusions to ways of being, and further, to the made-up of an existence. Indeed, writ loose, those bodies birthed forth in Charlott’s swathes of pigment, oil, ink, sanguine crayon and on occasion blusher sit restively with the context of their world; through moments of rupture, challenge and provocations these bodies emerge.

Echoing something of Cy Twombly’s philosophy that “to paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release”, Charlott works through an “ecstatic impulse”; a way of working that fundamentally aligns with her restless use of subject matter. That is, her paintings emerge through a visceral dialogue, the active meeting of paint and surface. Her series, Notes on Wine (2021) is perhaps indicative of this approach. Developed as part of her residency at the vineyard of Cascina Gilli, NEVVEN, Piedmont, Italy this series of portable paintings fold together the site and social specificities of classic wine production as well as disparate references from classical mythology to Hollywood gossip, to compose a body of work which reflects something of the hazy escapes found in the consumption of rouge night nectar— aka, the full-bodied red flowing from the Piedmont’s regions vineyards: wine.

There is elegance in this metaphysical amassment. A careful process of maceration whereby figures, rendered with soft flesh tones, draw us into an unembarrassed world of crimson ripples. As with Charlott’s wider practice, the paintings in this series emerge from an interior space fertile in associative ideas, sensations and desires.

Not only confined onto the stretched canvas form, Charlott’s practice is one of risk. Seeking to experiment with how far she can push and pull her subject through the formalities of a material body, the artist allows formal painting and fleeting sketch to conflate. In her large sail shaped paintings in He at Sea (2018), Charlott unmoors common archetypes, re-rendering masculine ideals by depicting virile body forms in states of emotional recline. Paired with seascape iconography, seahorses, stars and sun-bleached beaches, the bodies seen act as protagonists; they rise and fall and waver, rejoicing and jesting to each other, becoming liquid and wholly immersed in an ego-erotic reality, only found beyond the hard shores of dogmatic life. We can read a critical urgency here, much like Charlott’s wider practice, the series has a tone best expressed in the formal struggle as the painter moves between her medium and the bodily.

Charlott’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, For these thoughts we change into pink, will open in January 2024.