Matthew Weinstein

After creating computer-animated characters, Matthew Weinstein then enlists the talents of New York actors to provide the voices for his scripts and song lyrics—including Tony Award winners Natasha Richardson, John Benjamin Hickey, Dennis O'Hare, Blair Brown, and Hope Davis. He has constructed an ever-expanding index of characters that includes a singing koi, a mechanical carp, two lovelorn Siamese fighting fish, golden dancing skeletons, three larcenous pigs, a chauffeur, a Chinese toddler, and an old man who lives inside of a roast chicken.

From his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Weinstein and his team of animators create his animated films from the ground up. They create the settings and characters and have even constructed a motion capture system to translate movement and dance into animation. Weinstein is also known for his paintings, which are based on his animated films. Using airbrush, paintbrush, and precision stenciling, Weinstein's paintings are worlds unto themselves. They exist independently from his animations. They are abstractions of his virtual worlds. They exist in a space Weinstein calls "unrealism."

Weinstein was the first American artist to have a major exhibition at the new Pinakothek der Moderne in Berlin, Germany. Most recently, he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO; and Sonnabend Gallery, New York, NY. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Lisbon Biennale; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. He is currently working on a public multimedia project based on the biography of Cellini, as well as an animated film commission for the Charlotte Symphony in North Carolina.