Emily Weiner Depicts Spaces that Transcend Our Physical World
Emily Weiner’s otherworldly paintings explore the art canon through a feminist and Jungian lens. Finding synchronicity in combinations of colours, forms, and symbols, her work sheds a new light on archetypal images. Traditional symbols and narratives take on a new meaning in her work. Her paintings are rendered in simple geometric forms but contain layers of complex and open-ended concepts: curtains open up to skyscapes with a full-moon, spirals draw the viewer into a space beyond the canvas. The artist paints intuitively, as if watching a dream unravel on her canvas. Depicting spaces that transcend our physical world, her paintings are imbued with cosmic symbolism that brings us closer to a unified understanding of our place in the universe.
Emily Weiner (b. 1981 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter living and working in Nashville, TN. She received a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University and her MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York City. She was a winner of the Hopper Prize (2022), an awardee of the Current Art Fund through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021), and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022 and 2023). A few of her recent exhibitions include: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, Germany (2024); Lamb Gallery, London, UK (2024); Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville, USA (2024); Entrée, Bergen, Norway (2023); Huxley-Parlour, London, UK (2023); Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, Italy (2023); Wespace, Shanghai, China (2022).
What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?
Some of my earliest art memories are visiting the Whitney Museum in New York City with my parents. When I was a kid the museum was uptown, and it housed a permanent exhibition of Alexander Calder’s “Circus”: a menagerie of puppet-like animals and performers, all made from simple materials like wire and fabric. The display also included a video of the artist bringing the somewhat absurd sculptures to life in an earnest performance.
Describe your work in three words.
Rhythmic, mercurial, symbolic
Terra Nuda, 2024. The work was exhibited in “Ode to a Beautiful Nude” at Wilder Gallery.
“Let the light in,” 2024. The work was exhibited in “I look to the moon like a fellow traveller” at Lamb Gallery.
Where do you draw your inspiration from?
In many of my recent paintings, I draw inspiration from theater and magic—as well as modern physics. I am very interested in how we make sense of our world through stories, metaphors and models.
There is also a paradoxical component to the paintings: Beyond conveying archetypal symbols, I’m also trying to convey a sense of the rift between what we perceive with our senses, and a more profound “reality” that might be hiding behind the curtain.
Can you describe your creative process and how you choose the colour palette for each work?
The overall color schemes arise from a feeling that I want to convey. Some combinations of colors just feel “right” or balanced—and I can’t completely explain why, kind of like choosing a minor chord over a major in music.
In addition to these initial intuitive colors, I will employ basic color theory if there is something specific that I want to convey: advancing or receding space, vibrating boundaries between forms, aerial perspective.
I was thrilled you created the painting ‘Terra Nuda’ for the show “Ode to a Beautiful Nude” I co-curated at Wilder Gallery. What is the inspiration behind this work?
The painting Terra Nuda is simple formally but it is open-ended conceptually.
It’s a landscape with a big, pink-to-blue gradient sky, flanked by white curtains opening to a full moon at the painting’s center. The symmetrical curvature of the curtains are reminiscent of a female figure, outlining the silhouette of a torso.
The inspiration comes from a few sources: the 1924 photograph Le Violon d'Ingres by Man Ray, but especially the painting L’esprit saint by the Belgian artist Jane Graverol, which is one of my favorite paintings of all time. (Graverol was in the same circle as Man Ray and fellow famed Surrealists, but as a woman she is much lesser-known in art history). In each of these paintings, there is an unresolved duality between the figure and the ground, subject and object, which I find compelling.
Space Between, 2024. Oil on linen in painted wood frame.
Mater Luna, 2024. Oil on linen.
Tell me about the recurring symbolic forms in your work.
The ideas for paintings usually start intuitively. I will often begin with a ground of color, and then add graphic forms, like curtains, a spiral, a full-moon sky. These foregrounds have to do with recognizing cycles of return—and possibly a broader cosmic order. Often imagery from older paintings will recycle back into the work: f-holes of a guitar, trap doors, vases depicting ancient Greek mythology. Sometimes paintings feel like a hall of mirrors, but I enjoy getting lost in them while painting—and then decoding them once they are done, kind of like interpreting a dream.
Are there any artists who have especially inspired you?
I grew up with posters of Georgia O’Keeffe in my childhood home, and she has always been a model for living an artist’s life.
What would be a dream project for you to work on?
It would be a dream to partner with working physicists to make paintings that might describe visually what is inaccessible to most of us without a grasp of advanced mathematics or cosmology. Our society really needs equanimity right now.
Two years ago NASA’s James Webb telescope began sending back images to earth that should still be front-page news. They are wild! We can see deep-field images of galaxies, and detailed weather patterns on Jupiter. I wish that people could be as enraptured by cosmic order as they are in political chaos. Maybe it’s branding? If scientific proof alone isn’t enough, maybe art and universal symbolism can help get us closer to a unified understanding of our place and preciousness as a species.
What are you working on next?
I’ve just finished paintings for a solo booth at NADA Miami in December with my Nashville Gallery, Red Arrow. And I’m working on a series of new paintings for a solo show at Huxley Parlour Gallery in London, called Elastic Concept. The title comes from a quote from Carl Jung:
Love is an elastic concept that stretches from heaven to hell
and combines in itself good and evil, high and low.