Dad Bod (2026) — BEN WEINER

Installation View, Ben Weiner: Mood Drawings, Mark Moore Fine Art

Detail, Winter Sounds, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Furosemide solution, 26 x 38 inches

Installation View, Ben Weiner: Mood Drawings, Mark Moore Fine Art

Detail, Groundhog Day, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Codeine solution, 40 x 32 inches

Installation View, Ben Weiner: Mood Drawings, Mark Moore Fine Art

Detail, My July, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Codeine solution, 40 x 32 inches

December, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Oxycontin solution, 38 x 26 inches

Winter Sounds, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Furosemide solution, 26 x 38 inches

Groundhog Day, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Codeine solution, 40 x 32 inches

June Variation, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Tylenol and Kombucha solution, 40 x 32 inches

August I, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Tylenol solution, 32 × 40 inches

My July, ink on chromatography paper soaked in Codeine solution, 40 x 32 inches

April (My Face), ink on chromatography paper soaked in Tylenol and Mezcal solution, 40 x 32 inches

BEN WEINER: DAD BOD, PRESENTED BY MARK MOORE FINE ART AND ARTSY, MARCH 12TH - MAY 3RD, 2026

Mark Moore Fine Art is pleased to present Ben Weiner: Dad Bod, an exhibition of the artist’s recent Diary drawings. Weiner creates these works by soaking ink-coated paper in solutions of drugs, producing colorful, psychedelic washes. The ongoing series emerges from contemporary culture’s obsession with bodily enhancement through chemical products. In Dad Bod, however, the thirteen new drawings turn toward a more personal register. Harnessing abstraction’s capacity to evoke the body in its absence, these meditative works embed lived experience and mortality within mark-making, process, and material.

Weiner begins each of his Diary drawings by applying gestural ink marks to a sheet of chromatography paper with markers. He then soaks the ink-coated paper in solutions of crushed drugs mixed with water, which chemically breaks down the inks into hazy, prismatic spectrums of color. Through chromatography, a process used in forensic laboratories, each substance releases a distinct spectrum of color from the ink, enhancing the abstract gestures inscribed on the paper.

Weiner typically makes his drawings using substances left from his own consumption, including marijuana, Paxlovid, Doxycycline, Penicillin, Vicodin, MDMA, Mezcal, Tylenol, and caﬀeine, so that the drawings constitute a chemical diary of his shifting mental and physical states. In these recent works, he also incorporates prescriptions belonging to those close to him. As suggested by the title Dad Bod, this performative use of drugs-as-medium operates as a meditation on mortality and the passage of time. In April (My Face), a spectrum of colors flows across the paper, released by Mezcal ingested on a spring day and Tylenol taken to ease the hangover. Palliative medications, such as the Codeine used to produce Groundhog Day, underscore the repetitive nature of care within the aging process. Weiner has referenced using his grandfather’s late-life medications to make this drawing and several others. The original ink gestures in Groundhog Day have a rhythm recalling Jackson Pollock’s movements in his painting Blue Poles. Lines of color radiate from these gestures as a result of repeatedly dipping the paper into the Codeine solution.

Through these procedures of marking, soaking, and dipping, Weiner has developed a signature language of hazy fields permeated by blips and striations. The works in Dad Bod introduce a relief element to this lexicon, formed when pills from his solutions adhere to the paper during soaking. Both sculptural and graphic, these pill remnants punctuate the rhythm of his gestures and color fields. In Winter Sounds, Furosemide pills are dispersed across the surface like rain droplets on a pond, while the striations left by dipping suggest ripples in water. The artist obtained the Furosemide from a loved one who struggled with a heart condition, adding another layer to the work’s pulsating patterns. In Ogunquit, Weiner used Doxycycline remaining after treating his son for a tick bite during a vacation in Maine. The salmon-pink pills register against a ground of deep turquoise and green, resting atop the graphite underdrawing and extending the work' graphic possibilities.

In these works, Weiner’s drawings operate on two levels: as acts of artistic self-expression and as portraits of himself and his loved ones, traced through habits, recreations, injuries, illnesses, and care. His dual approach is rooted in the history of abstraction, from Color Field painting’s formal expressions of emotion to Terry Winters’ schematic spatial fields. Within this lineage, the daily act of art-making converges with the routines of living, where care accrues through small, repeated gestures. Weiner’s meditative fields of color hold these iterative acts of care—at once Sisyphean and sacred. Against the backdrop of our increasingly chemically mediated relationships with our bodies, he employs slow, materially driven processes of sketching, soaking, and chance to reestablish a connection to his interior states.