Grace Weaver joins The Städel Museum Collection • 07.01.–07.01.2026

We are pleased to announce the acquisition of GRACE WEAVER’s Untitled (Couple in a Trashscape), 2022, by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

The painting originates from Weaver’s Trash Scapes, a series in which pared-down nighttime settings unfold as familiar, almost intimate everyday spaces. The two figures move with a calm assurance through a terrain of bags, bottles and scattered objects- elements that act less like props and more like bodily counterparts, a “negative mirror” of the human form. Within this attentiveness to movement and environment, Weaver develops a scale rooted directly in her own physical experience. Steps, gestures and postures become slightly larger than life, giving the figures a distinctive physical presence that shapes the entire composition.

The work connects to traditions of genre painting and to the ongoing question of how the human figure situates itself within its surroundings. A resonance with Baselitz’s Heroes can be felt – not as a direct citation, but as part of a shared art-historical conversation. While Baselitz responds to the fractures of the postwar moment, Weaver turns toward a present shaped by everyday actions, routines and perceptions. Her sense of monumentality grows not out of historical rupture, but out of the intensity of ordinary life. Weaver describes this approach as a “tender realism”: a realism that takes the everyday seriously and reveals its understated emotional depth.

The acquisition by the Städel Museum marks an important moment in the institutional reception of Weaver’s practice and underscores the strength of her position within an expanding museum dialogue.

Image:
Grace Weaver
Untitled (Couple in a Trashscape), 2022
oil on canvas
241.5 × 226 cm / 95 × 89 in