Blood On Blood
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Blood on Blood, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Austyn Weiner. The exhibition is a deeply personal exploration of relationships, encompassing the familial, the romantic, and the diverse roles that Weiner embodies as a daughter, sister, and partner. The artist's practice, chaotic and emotionally charged, is born amidst the frenetic repetition of music and the incessant phone calls to loved ones.
Blood on Blood takes its name from the lyrics of the Bruce Springsteen song Highway Patrolman, from the 1982 album Nebraska. The song alludes to the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love one feels towards their kin. The exhibition's title represents how deeply unwavering these bonds are felt by Weiner and her family - an affection that knows no bounds, an impassioned and complicated love vividly depicted on the canvas.
“The exhibition can be understood like a concept album, with each painting serving as a track, informed by Weiner’s own listening habits. Influenced by the writing style of Nebraska, each of the paintings in the exhibition offers distinct insight and understanding, while coming together to unveil an overarching narrative.”- Justine Ludwig, Executive Director of Creative Time
In Thunder Moon (The Twins), the artist introduces her older twin siblings. The painting, evocative in some ways of Monet's water lilies, is fittingly presented as a diptych - a representation of two entities that merge into one, mirroring the unique connection shared by twins, or partners. Weiner’s looping gestures recall cursive signature, marginalia drawn in her Freud reader, and even the double helix. At the base of the painting a ghost of a white bar is visible. The artist had originally taped it off to make a text bar, but words never materialized. Instead it became “a beautiful gutter” where the left-over paint from the artist’s brush would come to rest. It serves as a space for breath and reflection amongst the madness.
Weiner, who is the youngest of four siblings, is exploring a visual language that conjures intimate scenes of childhood memories through the use of symbolic colors and forms. In Big Sister, Little Brother, Weiner imagines a fictitious dynamic in which she is the older sibling and her brother the younger. Employing a palette of darker tones, she expresses a complex sentiment hinting at the ever-changing complexities of sibling dynamics. The Pantry, appearing as an extension of the previous painting, recalls a frozen moment in time when Weiner and her brother enter their childhood pantry.
“Language from the books Weiner reads and the music she listens to manifests in her paintings in close proximity to visual manifestations of familial dynamics and personal milestones. Weiner writes extensively as part of her creative practice. The texts that she writes in pen in confident block lettering sit somewhere between diaristic and poetic—reflections on the process of creation, song lyrics, snippets from conversations held during the day, and stories of family. Portions of this writing become titles for the works, or find themselves inscribed directly on the canvas surface. For Weiner, all her lived experience, paired with the banal rhythms of the day, find their way into the work. As a result, paintings can at times be jarringly personal. Weiner places a trust in the viewer that they will perhaps find shared intimacy in the work.” - Justine Ludwig, Executive Director of Creative Time
Whites of my Eyes features the artist herself. Now in her thirties, she vividly remembers a moment during the creation of the works for this exhibition, when she looked in the mirror and her eyes had taken on a yellowish hue. This signified a loss of innocence, a loss of youth. With a touch of self-deprecating humor, Weiner employs rapid, forceful brush strokes to capture her present self on the canvas. Subtle ochre tints blend with the whites, while bold splashes of burgundy merge with lively bursts of orange.
Six of Us quite literally welcomes her immediate family onto the canvas, envisioning them all together within the same embryonic sac. They are depicted as small embryos in a bright yellow liquid that envelops and embraces them, floating together prior to full formation and the impact of external forces.
In Blood on Blood, the artist deciphers the complexities of family dynamics, but also the profound relationship with oneself. Through a narrative approach, Weiner explores the evolution of these important connections, the ebb and flow of love, laying them bare for viewers to engage with and gain an understanding of one of the most precious yet intricate aspects of the human experience - our familial bonds.
The Artist
Austyn Weiner (b. 1989, Miami, FL) studied photography at the University of Michigan and Parsons School of Design prior to relocating to Los Angeles, where she currently lives and works.
Working in oil on linen at a heroic scale, Weiner brings a bounding athleticism to her lyrical abstraction, using brushes and oil sticks to draw her signature glyphs and characters into washes of brilliant color. Drawn from her own life and family history, her work calls on female postwar abstraction and the Jewish-American experience to bear a painterly grammar that is very much her own, and in the very present tense. Her process of repeated painting-in and rubbing-out gives her work a distinctive tempo that speeds up and slows down from work to work. Her paintings are a record of time, place, and psychological agita. In a recent Vogue profile, arts writer Dodie Kazanjian wrote of Weiner’s physicality, “this is full-arm painting.