MADRID.- As part of the exhibition programme dedicated to the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, the museum is presenting Anna Weyant (born Calgary, 1995). This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a museum and includes a total of 26 canvases and works on paper, selected from her most recent output.

Weyant's works reflect artistic references ranging from the Baroque to the art of the first half of the 20th century, periods well represented in the collection of the Museo Thyssen. The installation reveals these connections through the display of the artist’s paintings in a visual dialogue with five works from the Permanent Collection selected by Weyant herself, including paintings by Mattia Preti, Magritte and Balthus, among others.

Known for her depictions of young women, Anna Weyant represents a world suspended between the dreamlike and the everyday, with a figurative style shaped by artistic tradition. Her iconography explores the genres and conventions of art history from a contemporary perspective and refers to both American popular culture and inter-war modern movements such as Surrealism. Weyant looks to the past but also reflects on the present, fusing her painting technique with dark humour and a contemporary feminist perspective.

For the past eight years the artist has been interested in the complexities of female adolescence. Her subjects seem to inhabit this life phase, between childhood and adulthood in a fairy tale or a doll's house, imbued with a sense of expectation that continues in a series of still lifes in which objects are shown on the point of collapse: half-inflated balloons, undone ribbons and almost wilted flowers.

Some of the canvases in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection which accompany the works of Anna Weyant connect with this theme of the passing of time, such as the Baroque genre scene The Concert (ca. 1630-1635) by Mattia Preti and Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile with a Mask in her Right Hand (ca. 1720-1730) by Piazzetta. Furthermore, the presence of sinister elements that haunt the worlds of her heroines is evident in Portrait of Dr. Haustein (1928) by Christian Schad, in which a spectral figure looms over the sitter, and also in the illusion created by Magritte in The Key of the Fields (La Clef des champs) (1936). Also included in the exhibition is Balthus's The Card Game (1948-1950).