AUSTYN WEINER: HALF WAY HOME
Lévy Gorvy Dayan is thrilled to announce Half Way Home by Los-Angeles based artist Austyn Weiner.
May 8 – June 21, 2025
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.
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.