Image: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is presenting Faye Wei Wei’s ‘Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.’, a solo exhibition of emotionally charged paintings that move between representation and abstraction. The exhibition is on view from August 28, 2026, through March 7, 2027, in Cleveland.
Wei Wei’s paintings combine surreal imagery with unstable spaces, forceful gestures and sharply contrasting colors. Her compositions often place elongated limbs and partially obscured figures within tilted environments, while faces and objects dissolve into washes of paint. The resulting works maintain a tension between recognizable forms and painterly abstraction.
The exhibition’s presentation describes Wei Wei’s approach to color as deliberately resistant to harmony, bringing together bruised purples, acidic greens and chalky pinks. Sweeping marks alternately conceal and reveal figures, creating spaces in which bodies appear to overlap, drift or remain suspended. The paintings draw on the emotional shifts associated with poetry, including the fragmentary and surreal qualities found in the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson.
Wei Wei’s subjects move through themes of love, memory and release. The museum characterizes her practice as theatrical and mythological, with the material presence of oil paint contributing to the charged atmosphere of the works. Rather than separating figurative imagery from abstraction, the paintings allow each mode to continually transform into the other.
The exhibition includes ‘Everlight (O arching strands of song),’ a 2026 oil painting on canvas measuring 120 by 96 inches. The work is identified as an exhibition image and is credited to photographer Pat Garcia. No additional checklist or installation details are provided in the exhibition materials.
Born in London in 1994, Wei Wei lives and works in New York. She received a BA (Hons) from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London in 2016 and an MFA from Yale University in 2026. Her recent solo exhibitions include ‘Tiny Melody Chamber’ at SITUATIONS in New York in 2024, ‘The Moon Balloon of New York City’ at Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna in 2022, and ‘Moon’ at Galerie Kandlhofer in 2021. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and she is listed as a guest judge for the 2026 Jackson’s Art Prize. ‘Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.’ remains on view at moCa Cleveland through March 7, 2027.
