* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Caleb Weintraub received a BFA degree from Boston university and earned his MFA at The University of Pennsylvania where he studied under John Moore, Alfred Leslie and Jackie Tileston among others. He makes paintings and sculptures that convey far flung narratives that examine ritual, memory, and collective fears/fantasies. Through the combination of anachronistic props, unlikely settings and an emphasis on material, Weintraub presents uncanny situations that alternate between the viable and the virtual, dream worlds that recall art work from the past and present them as exorcisms. His work is distinguished by an unlikely use of materials, often utilizing paint to mimic sculptural marks and addressing sculpture with a painterly hand.
Caleb explains the work by saying, “I make paintings that address the absurdity of the fight, the interchangeability of players. From a child’s point of view, there could not be anything more painful, more confusing, more preposterous than war…at once tragic and spectacular. Even when sides could not appear more different, their causes more diametric… dogmas dissolve, rationales morph, cultures tend to merge and the victors and the vanquished begin to look alike. I make paintings that poke at these issues and that call attention to paint as a similarly loaded medium. By mining the iconography of the west, referencing regimes, tangling cultural and political symbols and drawing from art history, I explore contradictions.”
