Margarita Weiner
Matters of Fact and Other Matter
September 22 through October 27, 2013
Texan Equities is pleased to present Matters of Fact and Other Matter, a selection of paintings by Margarita Weiner. Born in Douglas, Arizona, living and working in Los Angeles, she has been painting and sculpting since 1978, having had her first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Gallery for Emerging Artists in 1983. She has since built a massive body of work strongly influenced by surrealism and formal abstraction, and has developed a highly personal language of representational and figurative imagery that coexists and interacts with abstract elements, often delving into political and social subject matter that are manifested in current events, popular media and world history.
Most of the artworks in this exhibition are from 2000 to present with the majority from 2012 and 2013. What inform this unique selection of works are principally the relations between the representational elements, or identifiers (matters of fact), and the painterly gesture and abstract movement between these elements – an emphasis on what paint does - definable as matter. There exists in these tableaux what can be characterized as an almost musical arrangement, a calm but complex interaction between the elements. The viewer is compelled to trace and follow every motion and change throughout the canvas as a way of visually “ingesting” the painting. Meanwhile, the whole suggests a deceptively simple read from the standpoint of content, eponymously denoted as “Matters of Fact.” These matters of fact are the recognizable objects in the picture plane: flowers and grass; suns and moons; piano keys and cows; faces and bodies; windows and cocktails, perhaps. The psychological tenor of these works can also be described as matter of fact – they are neither dark nor brooding, nor are they jubilant or conspicuously optimistic.
They are clear and lucid surrealist, formal abstractions; harmonious and open at all ends.
