Something Borrowed, Something Plum

Something Borrowed, Something Plum is Austyn Weiner’s first solo exhibition in Milan at MASSIMODECARLO. The title reworks the Victorian wedding rhyme by replacing “blue” with “plum,” a color that becomes the emotional and visual core of the show, more than a hue, it acts as a state of mind tied to loss, love, nostalgia, and repair.

Appearing spontaneously in her work after a period marked by both mourning and celebration, plum is paired with yellow, associated with joy, in a pared-down palette the artist describes as an emotional self-portrait. The exhibition brings together two painting cycles created a year apart, centered on two opposing events: a family loss and a wedding. These give rise to two distinct formal approaches: on one side, gestural works carved without brushes; on the other, layered and atmospheric paintings whose textures recall her earlier floral vocabulary.

The project explores memory as a transformable, narrative material, positioned between past and future while suspending the present. The most recent works open onto post-event emotional landscapes, with embryonic forms and still horizons that question what remains after upheaval.

Writing and painting develop in parallel: poems and notes accompany the canvases, creating a porous exchange between gesture, thought, and symbol. The works do not resolve dualities, mourning and marriage, fracture and repair, but hold them on the same surface. In Rewind, the buttons of a Walkman become memorial markers: processing loss means retracing not only a person, but an entire landscape of sounds and lived experience.