NEW YORK, NY.- Lichtundfire and curcioprojects are presenting Beyond A Day, Martin Weinstein’s debut solo exhibition at Lichtundfire. Weinstein previously exhibited at Lichtundfire in the group exhibits Sense of Ice, Luxurious Growth and Counterpoints to the Narrative.
“I was an abstract painter but my love of the visible world compelled me to portray it in other work which I kept separate. Abstraction didn’t satisfy my delight in seeing. Alternately, I couldn’t simply paint the appearance of the world as a single reality. I gradually developed my method of painting over time in sequential layers on transparent plexiglass sheets enabling me to juxtapose visual material so that passages float upwards, influencing successive layers of imagery.” Martin Weinstein, artist’s statement.
The exhibition title references Weinstein’s process of painting on site in the Hudson Valley region and returning to the same location a day, a week, a month and even years later. His paintings are layered constructions of three or four painted overlapping acrylic panels framed in a clear box. Weinstein paints an enhanced perception, memory and expectation of nature and time that is familiar yet beyond definition in its fleeting moment.
The paintings reference a theater – scrims and backdrops, scenery, multiple lights, etc – like the toy theaters Weinstein built as a child. However, the audience is not fixed in a seat with only a frontal view. This is almost theater in the round as the viewer, like the painting, changes perspective; looking in from the sides and peering behind one painted panel to the next.
Weinstein also explores time as described by physics, as noted physicist Julian Barbour once said “Time is what happens when nothing else does.” Time is an abstraction that humans have constructed much like the paintings. The panels are set at angles to each other with increasing distance between them with the farthest being the most abstracted. Echoing the transit of time as our perception slips away into memory.
“This development, that essential step beyond the norm, has made Weinstein one of the most important landscape painters of our time.” - Dominick Lombardi, curator, writer & artist, in an exhibition text. Weinstein combines and repositions Monet and Turner, a childhood favorite, and goes further than either of them.
Martin Weinstein is a native New Yorker, who has had 28 solo exhibitions and over 40 group exhibitions at galleries and institutions nationally. His work is part of numerous private and corporate collections, among them Chase Manhattan Bank. Media coverage has included Art in America, Artes Magazine, Arts Magazine, Huffington Post, New York Daily News, NY Art Beat, and The Philadelphia Enquirer to name a few. Weinstein is the Co-chair of the friends of AIM Program of The Bronx Museum of Arts and the Co-founder of Art in General.
