Artist: Austyn Weiner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Half Way Home by Los-Angeles based artist Austyn Weiner. Weiner’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery comprises three monumental paintings that form an immersive installation, representing the emotional, physical, and spiritual odyssey she traversed over the past year.

Using her pre-pandemic abstract landscape The Last First Symphony (2020) as a starting point, the exhibition was inspired in late 2023 by Claude Monet’s elliptical rooms of Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which were formative to Weiner. Wanting to create her own space of reflection and solace, she embarked on an ambitious room-sized installation of paintings. Yet shortly thereafter, the artist experienced incalculable loss in the span of a few months with the deaths of her father, her closest friend, and her grandmother. The large-scale works became the theater for processing her emotions, and for her experience of desolation and resilience. The ensuing panels capture the marks of this struggle, radiating the artist’s emotional realities of pain, sorrow, and longing as they evolved during the yearlong period; by her own admission, “this is the longest I have worked on a surface.” Here, unfolding across three paintings, each titled after a figure of love and inspiration lost, Weiner unveils her nostalgic past, her fall into grief, and her emergence in hope.

Described by the artist as landscapes and mindscapes, the paintings serve dual functions in their reflections of physical and psychological time and space. Throughout her practice, Weiner has turned to her surroundings for guidance, absorbing inspiration from her immediate environment. Her familiar settings include her studio neighborhood of Frogtown, Los Angeles, the nearby industrial LA River—along which she walks daily—and the seaside town of Èze in the South of France, where her late dear friend Tracy resided and where Weiner spent significant amounts of time developing her painting; her floral motifs stem from the unruly garden of Tracy’s Èze home. While the influence of the pastoral is immediately felt in the presence of the expansive works, so too is the dark and undefinable, echoing her personal pain and her response to social developments, from technological incursions to political violence.

In the present paintings, luminous and atmospheric hues of peach, pink, purple, green, and blue underlie the artist’s gestural and expressive mark-making. Energetic passages of color tumble rhythmically across the compositions. In Diamond Linings (Trace) (2024–25), constellations of Weiner’s abstract flowers gather around washes of blue that evoke the sea, sky, and heaven alike, alongside splashes and pours of thinned pigment. A horizon simultaneously emerges and is subsumed in the four-panel The Last Landscape (Art ’59) (2024–25), in which deep purples roil the picture plane. Embodying a tempest, Weiner here grapples with the grief of her father’s passing, materializing through vigorous applications of paint, pastel, crayon, and collage that detonate across the surface amidst visible fragments of Weiner’s text.

Speaking about the work with understanding and candor, Weiner observes, “It is hard to resolve a storm. I’ve had to paint the truth, and the truth is, I wanted to make a pretty painting, but life is not so pretty right now. I needed to capture that.” Dawn breaks on Weiner’s experiences of the past year in Chicken Scratch (Shirley Ann) (2024–25), where the dense organic accumulations of her preceding panels disperse, finding space, breath, and growth. Weiner has described the installation as a representation of mourning, a celebration of life, and a pursuit of peace. A symphonic elegy of color and form, it moreover marks a point of departure for the artist and an affirmation of her abiding belief in the transformative power of art to channel and to transcend.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Austyn Weiner creates lyrical abstractions utilizing oil, oilstick, pastel, and printed matter collage. Her practices in poetry and photography further inform her painterly sense, as do her surroundings— including the settings of her studio in Frogtown, Los Angeles, near the LA River, and Èze in southern France. The artist notes, “I use memory as a medium—conjuring and reframing my recollections so I can process my experiences and further understand myself. It is a lifelong pursuit.” In addition to drawing influence from her own life, family history, and Jewish-American heritage, Weiner has been inspired by figures across multiple disciplines including Joan Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Lucas Samaras, Joan Didion, and Lee Krasner. An action painter, she embodies emotional and intuitive states to render her gestural compositions, as well as channeling the rhythms of music in a synesthetic marriage of color and sound. Portrayed through full-body physicality, Weiner’s paintings evoke echoes of the temporal, psychological, and natural worlds she inhabits.

Born in 1989 in Miami, Weiner studied fine art, photography, and film at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Tel Aviv University, and the Parsons School of Design, New York. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2025); Massimo De Carlo (London, 2023; Paris, 2022); König Galerie (Seoul, 2022; Berlin, 2021); Journal Gallery, New York (2019); Bill Brady, Miami (2018); and Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), among many others. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.