Bio

Born in Vienna in 1971, into an Austro-Hungarian family, Shaye Weiss began painting and drawing as a teenager. In the 1990s he studied art, philosophy, and cinema at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint-Denis, where Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, and Jean-François Lyotard had taught. He began doctoral research there on the aesthetics of resistance in the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.
After a number of detours, including seven years in Bnei Brak, Israel, where he worked as a photographer and immersed himself in Hasidic tradition and Jewish mysticism, he returned to Vienna, where he lives and works.
His painting and drawing practice sits within what he identifies as neo-abstract expressionism and neo-gestural abstraction. The work draws on distinct but related genealogies: the painterly confidence of Joan Mitchell, the urgency of Dubuffet's scratch marks, the obsessive scribblings of Cy Twombly, the graffiti urgency of Basquiat, the intuitive overpaint of Arnulf Rainer, and the socially charged surfaces of Oscar Murillo. Each matters for different reasons.
The mark-making process is full-body, explosive, and fast. Gestures are automatic and spontaneous, yet the physical conditions under which they occur, the tools, materials, scale, and surface, are deliberately chosen. The works are documents of these performances. There is no hidden meaning. Everything is in plain sight: the marks, the colors, the collisions between them, and the cultural weight of the forms the hand keeps returning to.
Recurrent concerns include anti-Semitism, depression, anxiety, and death. Materiality is not a vehicle for these themes. It is where they live.