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拍品专文
Executed in 2021, in ecstatic loops and flurries of oil paint and oil stick, Austyn Weiner’s I Fell Open unleashes line and form across a staggering surface of almost four and a half metres. Emblazoned with flits and darts of yellows, pinks, reds and blues, this work testifies to the cathartic mark-making that lies at the core of Weiner’s painterly practice. Formed of three joined canvases, it stands as one of the largest mural-sized paintings that she has executed to date. Born in Miami in 1989, Weiner studied photography at the University of Michigan and Parsons School of Design, New York. Now, living and working in Los Angeles, the artist has recently announced her representation by Massimo De Carlo Gallery. In a tumultuous, symphonic display of coils, strokes and twists, I Fell Open is a triumph of Weiner’s vibrant language of abstraction.
I Fell Open emerges from a pivotal year for the artist’s production, during which she moved into a new 5,000-square-foot studio in Frogtown, Los Angeles. Sharing the monumental space with five multimedia women artists, Weiner’s painting has since expanded into a bold, newfound scale: ‘the physical space’, she says, ‘has entirely changed my practice’ (A. Weiner quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Meet the Women of Frogtown, An Artist Community Like No Other’, Vogue, 12 March 2022). Enabling the artist to work on multiple canvases at a time, Weiner’s painting process is intensely physical, evocative of a choreographed combat or dance between body, material, and space. Compelled by a feeling of being ‘at the mercy’ of her own paintings, the work’s title conveys an almost ecstatic submission and emotional release. Weiner’s proclivity for the all-consuming echoes 19th-century Romantic philosophies of the Sublime, and indeed, saturated with the marks of this physical exertion, I Fell Open is charged with the spectacular force of a seascape.
Fleeting and capricious, Weiner’s line seems to delight in its unconstrained and dynamic expression. Applying paint from a makeshift palette—a large table-top covered in a plastic sheet—she employs her entire arm-span and body to create sweeping strokes upon her surface. Unleashing stains and flourishes of colour, this unmediated, embodied technique evokes those developed by the titans of Abstract Expressionism. An effervescent lattice of drips, splatters and strokes attests to the influence of Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston. Automatic and repetitious scrawls of line conjure words, letters, and calligraphic text. Indeed, words often serve as a starting place for Weiner’s paintings, both as emotive prompts as well as constituting palimpsestic layers of underpainting. ‘I pick up on words anywhere and everywhere: a lyric in a song, my grandmother’s lectures, a taboo text message, a hypothetical love note’ (A. Weiner quoted in M. Vogel, ‘“I Re-Evaluate Nearly Everything in My Life”: In a Topsy-Turvy Year, Artist Austyn Weiner Is Focused on Finding Her Painterly Rhythm’, Artnet, 5 November 2020). Weiner’s freewheeling abstraction thus remains anchored in language, and speaks to a diaristic desire to navigate feeling, and the unconscious.
I Fell Open emerges from a pivotal year for the artist’s production, during which she moved into a new 5,000-square-foot studio in Frogtown, Los Angeles. Sharing the monumental space with five multimedia women artists, Weiner’s painting has since expanded into a bold, newfound scale: ‘the physical space’, she says, ‘has entirely changed my practice’ (A. Weiner quoted in D. Kazanjian, ‘Meet the Women of Frogtown, An Artist Community Like No Other’, Vogue, 12 March 2022). Enabling the artist to work on multiple canvases at a time, Weiner’s painting process is intensely physical, evocative of a choreographed combat or dance between body, material, and space. Compelled by a feeling of being ‘at the mercy’ of her own paintings, the work’s title conveys an almost ecstatic submission and emotional release. Weiner’s proclivity for the all-consuming echoes 19th-century Romantic philosophies of the Sublime, and indeed, saturated with the marks of this physical exertion, I Fell Open is charged with the spectacular force of a seascape.
Fleeting and capricious, Weiner’s line seems to delight in its unconstrained and dynamic expression. Applying paint from a makeshift palette—a large table-top covered in a plastic sheet—she employs her entire arm-span and body to create sweeping strokes upon her surface. Unleashing stains and flourishes of colour, this unmediated, embodied technique evokes those developed by the titans of Abstract Expressionism. An effervescent lattice of drips, splatters and strokes attests to the influence of Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston. Automatic and repetitious scrawls of line conjure words, letters, and calligraphic text. Indeed, words often serve as a starting place for Weiner’s paintings, both as emotive prompts as well as constituting palimpsestic layers of underpainting. ‘I pick up on words anywhere and everywhere: a lyric in a song, my grandmother’s lectures, a taboo text message, a hypothetical love note’ (A. Weiner quoted in M. Vogel, ‘“I Re-Evaluate Nearly Everything in My Life”: In a Topsy-Turvy Year, Artist Austyn Weiner Is Focused on Finding Her Painterly Rhythm’, Artnet, 5 November 2020). Weiner’s freewheeling abstraction thus remains anchored in language, and speaks to a diaristic desire to navigate feeling, and the unconscious.