Art can be all-encompassing. Physically — as is the case with Los-Angeles based artist, Austyn Weiner’s, mammoth paintings — and psychologically — as is also the case with Weiner’s unyieldingly honest works. Versed in the complexities of both abstract emotion and art, Weiner’s latest (and first solo) exhibition with art gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan is a candid exploration into how the two mediums interact (after all, when emotion is the driving force behind some of society’s most influential works of art, doesn’t it deserve the distinction of artistic medium?). 

Photography Jack Platner

Although not included in the exhibition, Weiner’s abstract landscape, The Last First Symphony (2020), serves as the installation’s starting point. However, it wasn’t until 2023 when, inspired by Claude Monet’s elliptical rooms of Water Lilies at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, that she was led to construct her own arena of reflection and solace through a sequence of room-sized paintings. 

Photography Jack Platner

Shortly after the project’s inception, Weiner’s world crumbled. Over the course of a few months the artist had lost her father, her closest friend, and her grandmother. Inevitably, the tide of Half Way Home had shifted, and the large-scale works became a space in which to process her feelings of desolation and illustrate the resilience that sprouted out of its rubble. 

Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

The installation unfolds across three paintings. The first reveals remnants of her nostalgic past. The second signifies her plunge into grief, while the final piece mirrors her eventual emergence in hope. Pain and sorrow run rampant across each canvas, but Weiner doesn’t mire us in one emotional narrative. Rather, she paints each impassioned reality under an evolutionary lens, stringing each panel with the thread of the ever-changing human condition. 

Photography Jack Platner

Operating as both landscape and mindscape, the works reflect physical and psychological time and space. In Diamond Linings (Trace) (2024-25) colors tumble across the composition. Abstract flowers, imitative of the unruly garden of her late friend Tracy’s home in the South of France, gather around swatches of blue that simultaneously evoke the sea, sky, and heaven.

Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Deep purples disturb the horizon cast on The Last Landscape (Art ‘59) (2024-25), as Weiner contends with the grief of her father’s passing. The four-panel work shows vigorous applications of paint, pastel, crayon, and collage, an artistic manifestation of sorrow’s protracted psychological effects. 

Photography Jack Platner

“It is hard to resolve a storm,” says Weiner. “I’ve had to paint the truth, and the truth is, I wanted to make a pretty painting, but life is not so pretty right now.” And yet, Weiner’s painting maintains its sincerity, whether it’s pretty or not. In between the oil sticks and pastels an unflinching story on love, loss, and longing takes shape, so that even when beauty rests in the eye of the beholder, the truth endures within the four art-lined rooms.

Photography Jack Platner

Half Way Home is currently on display at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery (19 East 64th Street, New York) until June 21, 2025.