About
Paul Weiner’s provocative work engages with issues surrounding autobiography, conspiracy, violence, and decoration. Spanning multiple aesthetic schemes and mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, generative art, and memes, he crafts images engaging with the tensions between symbolism and abstraction, reality and the imaginary, discomfort and adornment.
Weiner was born in 1993 in Denver, Colorado and graduated with a BFA from Syracuse University in 2015. His debut international solo exhibition American Amnesia opened in 2018 at Krupic Kersting Gallery in Cologne, Germany with his centerpiece 144 x 216 inch American flag painting entering the [GESAMTKUNSTWERK] collection. More recently, Weiner's work was included in the 2025 Mudam Museum cercle des collectionneurs Timeless Voices exhibition alongside Marina Abramović, Pierre Soulages, Peter Halley, and Rashid Johnson. His work has been seen at institutions and platforms including Museo Jumex, Museo Tamayo, Museo de Arte Moderno (CDMX), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, 52 Walker by David Zwirner, Mana Contemporary, and Pablo's Birthday as well as fairs such as UNTITLED Art Miami Beach. A recipient of multiple awards and residencies, Weiner was commissioned by Kehinde Wiley during his time at Wiley's Black Rock Senegal to make multiple artworks for his collection.
Weiner has described his conceptual process as being focused on the "waves of cultural history," but he draws inspiration from the psychological impact of images that contain cultural and political content rather than embodying any particular activist movement or cultural critique. Positioned within the lineage of American flag painting, Weiner's works advance the discourse by collapsing the flag into a physical instrument to be used as a canvas or brush through which the abstracted, painterly gesture is enacted. Making use of iconic images such as the American flag and his own viral generative AI paintings, Weiner conjures questions about beauty, violence, and the construction of truth that undergird the collective unconscious. In a 2023 New York Times article, Paulette Perhach described one of Weiner's projects in which he was “generating A.I.-created visual disinformation and seeing whether he can get the images to spread.”
Described by the artist as “explosions,” Weiner’s complex charcoal compositions are created with layers of painted, drawn, and splattered carbon that ages into a worked patina that evokes feelings of impermanence, destruction, and transformation. Weiner's work often deals with the ways in which images produced by violence and its aftermath, whether in legal documents or rubble, can produce the painterly sublime. Always pushing the boundaries between mediums, Weiner's explorations of generative AI have led to a collaborative process through which he prompts image generators to advance the formal output of his abstractions, creating a generative feedback loop through which technology and scrawled charcoal come together in contact with the canvas.
Weiner was born in 1993 in Denver, Colorado and graduated with a BFA from Syracuse University in 2015. His debut international solo exhibition American Amnesia opened in 2018 at Krupic Kersting Gallery in Cologne, Germany with his centerpiece 144 x 216 inch American flag painting entering the [GESAMTKUNSTWERK] collection. More recently, Weiner's work was included in the 2025 Mudam Museum cercle des collectionneurs Timeless Voices exhibition alongside Marina Abramović, Pierre Soulages, Peter Halley, and Rashid Johnson. His work has been seen at institutions and platforms including Museo Jumex, Museo Tamayo, Museo de Arte Moderno (CDMX), Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, 52 Walker by David Zwirner, Mana Contemporary, and Pablo's Birthday as well as fairs such as UNTITLED Art Miami Beach. A recipient of multiple awards and residencies, Weiner was commissioned by Kehinde Wiley during his time at Wiley's Black Rock Senegal to make multiple artworks for his collection.
Weiner has described his conceptual process as being focused on the "waves of cultural history," but he draws inspiration from the psychological impact of images that contain cultural and political content rather than embodying any particular activist movement or cultural critique. Positioned within the lineage of American flag painting, Weiner's works advance the discourse by collapsing the flag into a physical instrument to be used as a canvas or brush through which the abstracted, painterly gesture is enacted. Making use of iconic images such as the American flag and his own viral generative AI paintings, Weiner conjures questions about beauty, violence, and the construction of truth that undergird the collective unconscious. In a 2023 New York Times article, Paulette Perhach described one of Weiner's projects in which he was “generating A.I.-created visual disinformation and seeing whether he can get the images to spread.”
Described by the artist as “explosions,” Weiner’s complex charcoal compositions are created with layers of painted, drawn, and splattered carbon that ages into a worked patina that evokes feelings of impermanence, destruction, and transformation. Weiner's work often deals with the ways in which images produced by violence and its aftermath, whether in legal documents or rubble, can produce the painterly sublime. Always pushing the boundaries between mediums, Weiner's explorations of generative AI have led to a collaborative process through which he prompts image generators to advance the formal output of his abstractions, creating a generative feedback loop through which technology and scrawled charcoal come together in contact with the canvas.