Adam Lovitz & Seneca Weintraut

Inspired by a new age of investigation and discovery in outer space with the recent launch and deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, Commonweal has invited artists Adam Lovitz and Seneca Weintraut to present a series of paintings influenced by cosmic concepts.  Ideas such as the heavens, infinity, voids, stellar formation, black holes as well as the universe as a metaphor for personal discovery, are interwoven throughout these two remarkable artists’ bodies of work.

Lovitz (b. 1985) is inspired by the patinas that build up on objects over the course of everyday life and engages his paint like a sculptor.  He focuses on accumulating layers of materials to create his dimensional compositions which hover in between abstraction and figuration.  Incorporating textures into his paint, such as locally procured schist, results in surfaces that have an even greater appearance of depth due to the additives ability to absorb and reflect light in different measures. This inclusion of terrestrial texture gestures toward the star stuff in us all. Lovitz creates his works through “overwhelming the picture plane” with a variety of subjects in an attempt to break down the chaos and find that “simple charge” in each composition, which provides a protean jumping-off point for discovering the final image.  Lovitz is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and his works have been recently exhibited locally at the Woodmere Art Museum, AUTOMAT Gallery and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, as well as regionally at VCUArts (Richmond, VA), The Painting Center (NYC), the MANA Contemporary (Chicago), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NYC) and Trestle Gallery (NYC).  His work is in numerous private collections across the country.

Weintraut (b.1988) is a Hoosier living and working in Philadelphia. His works are developed from invented narratives that incorporate themes of exploration, place-making, science and American mythology.  They carry the residual energy of this narrative approach, subverting the traditionally didactic function of historical discourse and storytelling through their capacity to simultaneously be part of a whole as well as entirely separate from it.  Weintraut received his MFA in painting from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2015. In years past, Weintraut counted money on a riverboat casino, cut grass in an oil refinery, and built mausoleums in several prominent cemeteries. Nowadays, Weintraut maintains a studio at The Loom in Philadelphia where his paintings and simple woodcarvings explore the delusional ontology of Wood Grain Theory, searches for non-linear timelines, and continues to ask: “What is Diamondhead?” Weintraut attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2013. He has shown his work in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago and was featured in New American Paintings #113.