AUSTYN WEINER: SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING PLUM

MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to present Something Borrowed, Something Plum, Austyn Weiner’s first solo exhibition in Milan.

January 22 - February 28, 2026

The title plays on the Victorian wedding tradition, but the expected blue is replaced by plum, a purple so dense it feels more like a mood rather than a color.

Weiner describes the arrival of plum as involuntary. Returning to the studio after loss and celebration collided, the color took over the work, emerging organically and with little mediation, as if it had been waiting its turn. The palette narrowed accordingly: plum for the weightier parts of memory, flashes of yellow for joy and, in her words, “a kind of self-portrait.” Over time, that purple became the color of her recent life - a period shaped at once by loss and love, nostalgia and repair. In many Eastern traditions, the plum stands for perseverance through hardship; here it sharpens into a visual terrain of its own, a surface shaped by emotional impact.

The porousness between forms is central to Something Borrowed, Something Plum. The paintings channel the immediacy of gesture; the poems capture the thoughts that run underneath it; the symbols and fractured landscapes map the distance between experience and interpretation. Together, they reveal an artist testing how far a feeling can extend - across color, across time, across the surface of a canvas.

The show lingers in the space before and after an event, when emotion starts to harden into structure. The paintings don’t resolve the dualities that formed them - grief and wedding lace, plum and yellow, rupture and repair. They just let these forces share a surface, long enough to show their edges. For Weiner, holding them there is also a release: a way of setting the past down so something new can begin.