{"id":23682,"date":"2025-08-26T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T06:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/23682\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T06:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T06:00:09","slug":"rising-artist-emily-weiners-hypnotic-paintings-channel-cosmic-mysteries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/23682\/","title":{"rendered":"Rising Artist Emily Weiner\u2019s Hypnotic Paintings Channel Cosmic Mysteries"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the second year of her MFA at New York\u2019s School of Visual Arts (SVA), Emily Weiner<\/a> received some humbling feedback: \u201cYou need to learn how to paint.\u201d <\/p>\n

The critique came from Marilyn Minter<\/a>, the acclaimed photorealistic painter, who was Weiner\u2019s instructor. \u201cIt broke my heart,\u201d Weiner recalled over an iced matcha at a caf\u00e9 in New York\u2019s Chelsea gallery district late one June afternoon. At the time, she had been painting alla prima\u2014completing works in one sitting by applying wet paint to wet paint\u2014in the style of one of her artistic heroes, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Minter pushed Weiner to refine her technique and abandon alla prima painting in favor of building layers steadily, over time\u2014a process that had not been emphasized in her previous instruction. \u201cWhen I was in school, it was very out of vogue to make a technical painting,\u201d Weiner noted of the early aughts, when interdisciplinary and neo-conceptual practices were in favor.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d never guess that history by looking at Weiner\u2019s work today: tightly controlled, crisp paintings on which the artist\u2019s near-invisible brushstrokes create hypnotic illusions of depth. On the evening of our interview, Weiner opened her first New York solo show, \u201cNow Eve, We\u2019re Here, We\u2019ve Won<\/a>,\u201d at nearby gallery Miles McEnery<\/a>. This milestone adds to a flurry of recent interest in her work: Last year alone, Weiner had solo exhibitions in Mexico City, Berlin, and Nashville, and her works featured in group presentations and art fair booths from Chicago to Seoul. Her debut in New York holds a special place for Weiner, though. This is where she was born, attended college, and worked until she moved to Nashville in 2018. Her homecoming is \u201ca validation that I was on the right path the whole time,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

That path hasn\u2019t always been smooth. As a teenager, Weiner harbored ambitions to paint but lacked familial support to go to art school. She pursued a liberal arts education at Barnard College instead. She studied art history and environmental science, supplementing her coursework with painting classes that were more conceptually than technically rigorous\u2014then later \u201chad my ass kicked\u201d in grad school at SVA, she said. \u201dWhen I was in undergrad, I was so full of it,\u201d she recalled with evident amusement. \u201cI really thought I was great, and nobody had ever told me otherwise.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"Emily\"\"<\/p>\n

Portrait of Emily Weiner in her studio, 2025. Photo by Yve Assad for Artsy.<\/p>\n

Following her graduation from Barnard in 2003, a string of rejections from residencies and graduate schools brought her back down to earth. After ultimately being accepted to SVA and finishing her MFA there in 2011, she pieced together teaching gigs to keep the lights on, continuing to paint in her personal time. But once she and her husband, a musician, became parents in 2017, the economics stopped making sense. On their son\u2019s first birthday, they moved to Nashville, where Weiner took a curatorial job at Vanderbilt University. \u201cI physically have a lot more space,\u201d she said of her adopted home. \u201cBut the economic worries are also not taking up so much mental space anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately\u2014and perhaps counterintuitively\u2014the move away from the world\u2019s art capital was the accelerant that her career needed. It was also around this time that she departed from more muted tones in her painting and adopted the vibrant palette that defines her work now. It\u2019s almost as if, after she white-knuckled it in New York for so long, her loosened grip allowed more color to seep onto the canvas. In Nashville, Weiner struck up a fruitful relationship with local gallery Red Arrow<\/a>, which tapped her to curate a group show in 2022 and began formally representing her the following year.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why Weiner\u2019s new work has taken off. Her smooth, highly saturated gradients of paint catch the eye, and she deploys framing and compositional devices like spirals, curtains, and atmospheric perspective to draw it inward. Moons, instruments, amphoras, and hands folded in blessing recur in her work, part of a symbolic repertoire that conjures associations with the divine, the cyclical, and the spiritual. The idea of universal appeal underpins the work conceptually, too: Weiner is heavily influenced by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, which posits the existence of a symbolic language shared by humans across time. The artist\u2019s role, Jung wrote<\/a>, is to translate those symbols \u201cinto the language of the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiner does this translation from her studio in her historic East Nashville home, a fitting setting in which to develop a visual language that holds potent connections to the past. The Victorian house was built in 1899 and has a colorful history of its own: Its previous owner was the daughter of country music star Barbara Mandrell. Weiner, who quit her day job in 2020, now treats painting like a nine-to-five. But while her work time is highly structured, her intuitive process is not. She cycles between many paintings at once\u2014\u201cas many as will fit on the walls\u201d\u2014and often doesn\u2019t comprehend the significance of what she\u2019s depicted until after it\u2019s complete. She likens the experience to reading tarot: The image presents itself fully formed, and then she projects meaning onto it. <\/p>\n

\"Emily\"Emily<\/p>\n

While there\u2019s a definite mystical element to Weiner\u2019s practice, science also plays a role. For \u201cNow Eve, We\u2019re Here, We\u2019ve Won,\u201d she worked with her sister\u2019s partner, a woodworker, to create custom wood panels using 3D modeling software. The surface of one resulting work, Interference (all works 2025), mimics the ripples of wave interference patterns; another, Guidance, is shaped like a Fibonacci spiral. Painted atop these forms are familiar, ethereal motifs: celestial bodies, prayer hands, Crayola-colored sunsets. For Weiner, whose teenage obsession with Stephen Hawking was her \u201cnerdy dirty secret,\u201d physics and spirituality are part of the same exploration into \u201cwhat\u2019s behind the version of reality that we see\u201d and comprehend. She finds a sort of comfort in this mystery, she said. In Guidance, a black keyhole contains a tiny slice of galactic imagery that Weiner lifted from the findings of the James Webb Telescope\u2014a suggestion that the secrets of the universe are locked away, out of our reach. <\/p>\n

Broadly, Weiner\u2019s work approaches the vastness of observable reality with a wide, searching lens and a physical presence to match (most paintings in the show are human scale at around five feet tall). One work, though, stands out as more personal. Magician\u2019s Assistant, a smaller canvas with a custom ceramic frame, depicts a white rabbit in profile. The animal is Weiner\u2019s avatar, she admitted. For all the years that she worked in art-adjacent jobs before becoming a full-time artist, she felt like the white rabbit in a magic show\u2014the supporting actor who \u201cdoes the work, but doesn\u2019t get any of the credit,\u201d she said. The creature has a secondary meaning, though, as a symbol of curiosity and adventure. In Lewis Carroll\u2019s classic tale, it\u2019s the herald that Alice follows into Wonderland. Now, Weiner is that rabbit\u2014the one whose paintings lead us down the rabbit hole, into the mysterious wrinkles of the cosmos.<\/p>\n

Olivia Horn<\/p>\n

Olivia Horn is Artsy\u2019s Managing Editor.<\/p>\n

Video and thumbnail image by Yve Assad for Artsy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"During the second year of her MFA at New York\u2019s School of Visual Arts (SVA), Emily Weiner received…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[20007,365,362,363,364,366,18,20008,117,19,17,20010,20011,20009],"class_list":{"0":"post-23682","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-emily-weiner","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-miles-mcenery-gallery","20":"tag-olivia-horn","21":"tag-red-arrow-gallery"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}