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LOOT, charcoal on canvas, 51 x 67 cm, 2020

Installation view

Installation view

MONOPOLY, charcoal on canvas, 51 x 67 cm, 2020

Installation view

RIOT, charcoal on canvas, 51 x 67 cm, 2020 

Installation view

Void, oil and graphite on canvas, 52 x 41 cm, 2020 

Mourning in America, white paint on flag, 545 x 366 cm, 2020 

Installation view

Installation view

Status Quo, oil and graphite on flag, 52 x 41 cm, 2020 

Alibi, oil and graphite on flag, 52 x 41 cm, 2020

Installation view

In God We Trust #6, latex hose paint on canvas, 267 x 177 cm, 2018

Installation view

Installation view

Vigil, sculpture, 2020 

Vigil (detail), 2020

Vigil (detail), 2020

Popular Culture, sculpture, 2020 

Popular Culture, sculpture, 2020

Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 46 cm, 2016 

Installation view

Installation view

Void, oil and graphite on canvas, 52 x 41 cm, 2020 

Redacted (lawsuit), acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm, 2016 

Redacted (lawsuit), acrylic on canvas, 50 x 50 cm, 2016

Installation view

In his second solo exhibition at Krupic Kersting Gallery, Paul Weiner oscillates between bluntly populist text and nuanced, formalist abstraction. With his process interrupted by the pandemic, Weiner’s exhibition provokes timely conversations about corporate control, worker power, civil rights, technology, hegemonic power, and escapism.

Weiner presents raw statements about class power and solidarity that respond to the state of the economic and biological crisis as well as the political unrest in the United States. The new “text”-works co-opt Weiner’s long-standing charcoal aesthetic and obsession with violent mark making, responding in real time to a changing society and wondering out loud how society will look when the crisis ends. One excerpt of these works reads ‘FEAR RENT STRIKE SURVEILLANCE DATA UNREST PROTEST SICK CONTROL PRIVATE EQUITY TEAR GAS MONOPOLY STAY HOME RIOT’. 

Weiner’s Void paintings, primarily made before the coronavirus became ubiquitous, consist of impasto black oil paint and graphite on canvas. The works are coyly titled after escapist activities as in VOID (COUNTRY CLUB) and VOID (EQUESTRIAN).

Deftly painted alla-prima, the shimmering works appear as mature formalism even as they evince a purposeful vapidity cutting to the core of the art world’s commercial obsession with trading card minimalism and wealth signifiers. Weiner’s blacked out American flag paintings loom over the exhibition, suggesting a declining empire failing spectacularly to respond to 21st century challenges. Alongside these flags, Weiner presents prints of recent US government and internal corporate documents detailing technological geopolitics, US/China tensions, surveillance, and artificial intelligence races. This exhibition continues Weiner’s conceptual history of corporate skepticism following recent exhibitions addressing mass violence and military industrial complex profiteering in exhibitions at Athens Institute for Contemporary Art and Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art.  

Paul Weiner was born in Aurora, Colorado in 1993. He received a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University in 2015. His primary focus is a form of abstract painting that is imbued with political and social meaning, simultaneously riffing on neo-expressionism and post-conceptual painting. Many of his recent paintings and sculptures grapple with America’s contemporary identity and history, generating abstract, obscured, and distressed representations of a culture in flux. He is also known for his site-specific social media paintings, which can be found on Instagram. Weiner’s paintings contain a library of symbols that refer to the American flag, art history, cultural hybridity sports, folk history, the legal system, and the military industrial complex.      

Weiner’s works have been included in solo and group exhibitions at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, Houston, TX; Krupic Kersting Galerie, Cologne, Germany; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, Georgia; TWFINEART, Brisbane, Australia; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Pablo’s Birthday, New York, New York; Durden and Ray Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Re:Art, Brooklyn, NY; HF Johnson Gallery of Art, Carthage College, Wisconsin; SABOT/MIMI/FASTER, Berlin, Germany; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville, Florida; se! rum, Aarhus, Denmark; Alto Gallery, Denver, Colorado; Arvada Center for Arts and Humanities, Arvada, CO; Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany; Chabah Yelmani Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; YIA Art Fair, Brussels, Belgium; ARTBandini Fair, Los Angeles, California; Miscellaneous Press, Los Angeles, California; Leeds College of Art, Leeds, UK; York St. John University, York, UK; and CTRL+SHFT, Oakland, CA among others. He has participated in residencies such as Blackrock Senegal (invited by Kehinde Whiley (+ Commissions) and visiting artist engagements at Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin; Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville, Florida; Miscellaneous Press, Los Angeles, California; and Front Range Community College, Fort Collins, Colorado. At Syracuse University, Weiner received the Augusta Hazard and Roswell Hill awards while studying under Kevin Larmon, Sharon Gold, Jerome Witkin and Andrew Havenhand.

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