Contact: AustinAHayman@gmail.com

Austin Hayman is a Los Angeles painter whose figurative work operates at the edge of surrealism. His scenes are domestic and socially legible until a single element refuses the contract, a gesture inverted just enough to unsettle the reading without breaking it.

Hayman works through atmospheric perspective and tonal control. Distance softens, edges lose their certainty, and the picture seems to step back from the viewer before drawing them in again. The effect is not surrealism in the declarative sense; the world Hayman paints is the one already in the room, examined closely enough that its conventions begin to come apart. Body language carries the weight of the encounter; the inverted detail does the slow work of estrangement.

His titles, which tend toward the candid and the wry, return the viewer to ground level after the image has destabilized them. The paintings hold the two registers, the domestic and the uncanny, in working balance.

Hayman has exhibited in Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Milan. In 2025, he received the Jackson’s Art Prize Choice Award. He has forthcoming group presentations at Bozomag (San Francisco) and Megan Mulrooney (Los Angeles) as well as Hayman’s second time exhibiting with Make Room, his debut solo presentation.

Austin Hayman

b. 1989, Los Angeles, California

Lives and works in Los Angeles

SOLO EXHIBITION

   2026 Looking For A Friend, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA

SELECTED TWO PERSONS AND GROUP EXHIBITION

   2026 Love to Hate, Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA

             Summer Exhibition, Francis Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

             Los Angeles to San Francisco, Bozomag, San Francisco, CA

             Dallas Art Fair, Make Room, Dallas, TX

             Burnfield, Bozomag, Los Angeles, CA

   2025 Invisible String, Gagne Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

             Future Roots, curated by Brandon Satterfield, Los Angeles, CA

             Un Universo Cangiante e Dissidente, Orma, Milan, Italy

             MDC, Pauhaus, Los Angeles, CA

             Inherent Manifest, Gambit Gallery, New York, NY

             Love Letters, Rusha & Co, Los Angeles, CA

2024 Decomp, Block Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

RESIDENCIES & AWARDS

    2025 The Portrait, Jackson’s Art Prize, Winner

EDUCATION

   2010 Musician’s Institute, Los Angeles, CA,

SELECTED PRESS

VOYAGE LA | Conversations with Austin Hayman

Jackson’s Art | The Human Condition

Art Rabbit I | Pleasure, Intellect, and the Soft Sell: Dallas Art Week

Juliet Art Magazine | A Changing And Dissident Universe