Ejay Weiss Revolutionary Artist and Climate Crusader Is Revealed in Three Shows

“My work is the direct response to my treatment of the canvas as a quantum and unified field that works as a metaphor for the time-space continuum.  Each painting is a journey into the nature of continuity and discontinuity; offering a simultaneous view of both the microcosm and macrocosm.  Every stroke, runnel and spot of paint is a quantum moment which evolves into a completed painting.  This is a Zen-like process for me.”   -Ejay Weiss 

On Friday, November 1st, co-producers and co-curators, Jill Conner and Robert Zash, will open the first Solo Show of revered New York Artist, Ejay Weiss’ vast canon of celebrated work at Gallery Five Ten (139 West 35th Street – between Sixth & Seventh Avenues – on the fifth floor) where it will run through Monday, November 18. 100 of his 2,997 works of art will be on display.

Ejay Weiss – Emergence, is being presented in cooperation with John Yavroyan, Executor of Mr. Weiss’ Estate, and will feature 100 paintings of Mr. Weiss’ 2,997 works of art; concentrating on the most acclaimed pieces from five of his major Series including Emergence, Eden, Rift, Bowl: Maximum Entropy #4 and Bowl: Maximum Entropy #5.

Ejay Weiss – Emergence will then be open to the public, Monday through Friday (1:00pm – 6:00pm) to November 18.

Ejay Weiss (June 19, 1942 – June 9, 2018)  was born, raised and created art in New York City, the center of the Universe. It was the Earth’s relationship to that Universe that informed his art. Way ahead of his time, he was the first major artist to report to the Front Line in the original initiative against global warming, climate change and all things life-threating.  

From 1960 to 1963 he studied architecture and painting with Sibyl Moholy-Nagy at the Pratt Institute.  From 1963 to 1965 he studied painting at New York University.

In 1966 he began painting.  His architectonic approach to the picture-plane built bridges to the future; some say other worlds. He painted multiple perspectives of the same subject at the same time. The spatial evolution of his paintings redefined the parameters of the art form. His beat was the euphoric paradoxes of existence.

Between 1992 and 2008 Mr. Weiss served as Artist-In-Residence and Design Coordinator at the Cabrini Hospice in New York. In 2005 he was the first artist to be invited to conduct a colloquium at Rutgers University’s Graduate Division of Global Affairs.  In 2010, Rutgers invited him back to teach his ground-breaking course, “Art & Globalization: An Artist’s Perspective,” at their Political Science Department’s Graduate Division. He also delivered his Global Perspectives Lectures at The New School, the School of Visual Arts Museum Studies Program and for the MFA Program at Montclair State University.

Throughout his 54-year career, he received countless grants and honors including two nominations for the prestigious American Wing of International Art Critics Association Award. His work is in collections on five continents.

Ejay Weiss created with limitless boundaries and oracle-like clarity; borrowing heavily from every dimension and opportunity in the Earth’s library.

“In the Seascape paintings I evolved each shell specimen as if the canvas itself was the seabed. The forms emerged as a geological matrix, much the way tectonic forces move the continents across oceans.”   -Ejay Weiss 

Seascapes by Ejay Weiss will be at The Garment District Alliance’s 
Unique Installation in the Kaufman Arcade Lobby, 132 West 36th Street
November 1st through December 31, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, all day. 

Between 2008 and 2011 Ejay Weiss created a series of seascapes that present rocks, shells, and marine life resting on a seabed that is portrayed across 13 painted panels, on a monumental scale.  As hues of ocean water swirl throughout the illusionistic space, viewers are looking up to gaze down upon a wave-cresting shoreline.  The formless fluid substance of paint generates a gravitational momentum across the canvas, before settling and drying into its own geologic field. The spiral and circular forms represent the earth’s movement around the sun.

And in another part of the city, 9/11 Elegies: 2001-2011

The formal qualities that appear throughout his canon of work culminate in Mr. Weiss’ most monumental painting titled 9/11 Elegies: 2001-2011s.  Based on the artist’s personal and profound experience as a witness to the destruction of the Twin Towers, 9/11 Elegies: 2001-2011 includes a chronological series of twelve paintings. The first three panels portray the initial destruction of the Twin Towers. The 5’-square (Footprint Panels) and the rectangular panel (the Redemption Panel) represent the following day. The next six (Ghost City) panels, completed in September 2002, reflect a year of clean-up and clearing of the WTC site, as well as our emotional environment at that time. The final three panels (the Resolution Triptych), were completed in 2011. 

The paintings reside at the 9/11 National Memorial Museum.