Procession, 2023
In my paintings, I have been remixing symbols from the past and present, connecting visual threads that run from antiquity and the Italian Renaissance to craft traditions—to archetypes in folklore, theater, dreams, and nature. My work aims to consider Western imagery through a feminist lens; It opposes the idea that progress in history is a straight arrow, but is rather a winding timeline that overlaps, loops, often omits, and repeats. These paintings ask: How are representational images shaped, shared, and translated? How do they travel between or outside epochs? What are the narratives that dominate our stories, and how are they reinforced? Technically, these works—usually oil on linen, sometimes set in ceramic frames or on shelves—rely on intuition, time, and layers of paint.
Emily Weiner
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.
Emily Weiner’s paintings consider the art canon through a feminist and Jungian lens. By reconfiguring symbols which have been recycled throughout the history of art, her work questions how archetypal images are shared across generations—and how familiar symbols might be reordered to generate new, collective understanding. Weiner approaches each painting intuitively, and by working in many layers of paint, finds synchronicity in combinations of colors, forms, and symbols. She creates multimedia frames to further demarcate spaces of suspended disbelief in each of her paintings.
Select solo and group exhibitions include: Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY (2025); König Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2024); Huxley-Parlour, London, UK (2024); Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville, USA (2024); Entrée, Bergen, Norway (2023); Kunsthall Grenland, Porsgrunn, Norway (2023); Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, Italy (2023); Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, USA (2023); Pentimenti, Philadelphia, USA (2023); Wespace, Shanghai, China (2022), Gerdarsafn Museum, Kopavogur, Iceland (2017); and Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016). She has been a Visiting Artist/Scholar at the American Academy in Rome; Artist Resident at The Cooper Union, New York, NY; and Artist-in-Residence at The Banff Centre, Canada. She was an awardee of the Current Art Fund through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021 & 2025), a winner of the Hopper Prize (2022), and a nominee for the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022 and 2023). Her paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA and Kunsthall Grenland in Porsgrunn, Norway.