Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to host Ben Weiner's second solo exhibition in
Los Angeles. For the first time in the artist's career, the gallery will debut
four stop-motion video works in addition to five studio-fresh oil paintings
rendered in his signature photorealistic technique.
Through cropped magnifications, Weiner decontextualizes the commonplace to achieve
conceptually transcendent and enigmatic abstractions. In his most recent body
of work, the artist continues to resolve mass production with artistic creation
by referencing Clement Greenberg's formalist notion of art exploring the nature
of medium. Weiner's portrayals of synthetic materials such as high-fructose
corn syrup, beauty products, and oil paint, achieve arresting duality through
their vague familiarity and simultaneous mystique, reflecting our zeitgeist's
fascination with artifice and imitation. In conversation with Weiner's transformative
videos, his paintings confront our societal resistance to mortality and the
unrefined.
"His still lifes are filled with subjectivity, exuding a paradoxical mix
of sensuous attraction and frightening repulsion that virtually transforms these
microcosms of the world into a monumental, sublime universe."
– Joseph Jacobs, Art & Antiques (2007)