Biography
Martin Weinstein was born in New York in 1952 and grew up there and in Westchester County. He had a strong, early affinity for art, an interest encouraged by his father, a painter. Weinstein visited museums regularly with his parents, and recounts the particularly powerful experience of spending two days with his father at the British Museum, looking at Turner watercolors. Weinstein’s own work in watercolor began as a youth, making snapshot-like travel images, a practice that he has continued ever since.
Weinstein studied painting at the Tyler School of Art, graduating with a BFA in 1974. His early interest was in abstraction, ranging from the vivid canvases of Hans Hoffman, to the elegant stain paintings of Morris Louis, to the automatic spectacles of Gerhard Richter. Of particular note was the work of the minimalist artist Dorthea Rockburn, with her use of translucency and self-generating forms. Weinstein early works were large-scale stain paintings with cloud-like or interpenetrating geometric shapes. In the 1980s, he began masking portions of paintings, allowing for representational elements, such as clouds or leaves, to be layered on top of the abstract compositions. These works were followed by paintings which were, in their entirety, abstract landscapes.
Weinstein’s shift from abstraction to representation was based on the satisfaction he found in observing and portraying the visible world. However, abstraction remains as a structural foundation for his paintings with recognizable images. In 1988, Weinstein saw a limitation in simply representing a single view of the world, without access to the multiplicity of ways that we imagine reality. His solution was to paint various parts of the painting’s final image on clear sheets of acrylic plastic. This technique allowed for the juxtaposition of images, or the building up of a single image.
In the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, Weinstein painted a series of haunting interiors, using layered plastic, that were exhibited in Mutable Perception, his 1994 exhibition at Swarthmore College. The interiors were followed by a series of large-scale paintings of the streets of lower Manhattan, where Weinstein lives and works. His neighborhood is near Ground Zero and the events of 9/11 had a strong effect on him both personally and artistically. He saw the need to “paint what [he] loved”, particularly the landscape near his family’s home in Croton-on-Hudson, NY. The small, layered landscapes of river, sky, and woods formed the basis for an exhibition that traveled to ten museums and art centers across the United States.
Since 2004, Weinstein has produced the Teresa Paintings, a series of works featuring his wife, Teresa Liszka, in garden and landscape settings. In 1980, the painter and his wife founded Art in General, a leading alternative art space in lower Manhattan. Weinstein’s many group exhibitions include The Figure: Another Side of Modernism, held at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in New York in 2000.
– John Mendelsohn
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