To read my new exhibition review of “En Masse – Ensembles, Sets, and Variations: The Art of Howie Lee Weiss” in the May 2023 issue of the Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, click on the link here:

En Masse – Ensembles, Sets, and Variations: The Art of Howie Lee Weiss

By Stephen Wozniak

EXCERPT

Howie Lee Weiss is a unique artist in many ways. He creates fertile, buoyant, deceptively ingenuous black and white charcoal drawings – one of the oldest art mediums of this Earth – amidst the excessive, tech-obsessed, visually saturated world that we live in and gaze upon. Despite the uplifting, halcyon subjects that often populate his works, his art is about the many profound, weighty moments we face individually and as a social group. It’s important to have a Howie Lee Weiss around. He’s an artist who gets right to the point without presenting a strict, blaring, biased narrative often dished out in nightly television newsfeeds, online social media and even on the job. He always manages to do it on a human scale, at a human speed, for a fundamentally human need.

The towering, gridded, wall-pinned installation of Weiss’ portrait and landscape series form an almost symphony-like experience for gallery goers: a consort of fresh, forward voices and a choir of long-limbed trees – positioned opposite one another – which undulate and communicate an unwritten dialogue in the space. A third series of small, singular, framed portrait works, in between, punctuate and invite comparison with the bare groupings that reveal Weiss’s painstaking process. These facile faces and forested lands somehow help us define our individual identity, and – ultimately – return us home to our collective humanity and true nature.

Goya Contemporary Gallery
3000 Chestnut Avenue
Mill Centre 214
Baltimore, Maryland 21211

May 12 – July 29, 2023
E-mail: gallery@goyacontemporary.com
Gallery Instagram: @goya_contemporary_gallery
Artist Instagram: @howieleeweiss
Curator: Amy Eva Raehse
Gallery telephone: (410) 366-2001

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