NYAB Event - Martin Weinstein Exhibition

Martin Weinstein Exhibition

Allen Projects

This event has ended.

Martin Weinstein was born in 1952 and raised in New York and Westchester County. He had an early affinity for art, an interest encouraged and strengthened by his father, a painter. Weinstein visited museums regularly with his parents, and recounts the particularly powerful experience of spending two days with his father at the British Museum, looking at Turner watercolors. Weinstein's own work in watercolor began at a young age, making snapshot-like travel images, a practice he has continued ever since.

Weinstein studied painting at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, graduating with his BFA in 1974. His early interest was in abstraction, ranging from the vivid canvases of Hans Hoffman to the elegant stain paintings of Morris Louis and automatic spectacles of Gerhard Richter. Of particular note was the work of minimalist artist Dorothea Rockburne, with her use of translucency and self-generating forms. Weinstein's early works were large-scale stain paintings of cloud-like forms or interpenetrating geometric shapes. In the 1980s he began masking portions of the paintings, allowing for representational elements such as clouds or leaves to be layered on top of the abstract compositions. These works were followed by paintings which were entirely abstract landscapes.

This shift from abstraction to representation was based on the satisfaction Weinstein found observing and portraying the visible world. However, abstraction remains a structural foundation for his paintings. In 1988 Weinstein saw a limitation in simply representing one single view of the world, without accessing the multiplicity of ways we imagine reality. His solution was to paint various parts of the painting's final image on clear sheets of acrylic plastic. This technique allowed for the juxtaposition of images, or the building up of a single image.

The works are all painted on two or more sheets of transparent acrylic plastic. The process is an intuitive one, with the image developing and changing in stages that are not always predictable. The colors are built up in successive layers and worked on simultaneously from the bottom layer up and from the top layer down. The figure to ground relationship is crucial, so edges or the lack of them are important. A painting may be resolved in a week or sometimes it is left for a year, until the season returns.

The works continue the artist's interest in using varied styles of painting to represent the landscape at different times. Often within the same work, he layers disparate ways of imagining reality, rather than simply reconciling them. These paintings embody the artist's thoughts about time, simultaneity and metamorphosis in representing a landscape, which for the artist is charged with memory and emotion.
The work invites viewers to experience the painter's love of the visible world and his sense of the mutability of experience. Weinstein's paintings encourage their viewer to participate in the work both visually and emotionally, allowing them to resonate with their own feelings and sensibilities.

http://www.martinweinstein.com