Wade Guyton (b. 1972, Hammond, Indiana) is an American artist.[1] He produces work collaboratively with artist Kelley Walker under the moniker Guyton\Walker. Guyton lives and works in New York.
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Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana. He received his BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1995 and his MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 1998.[2] While a student at Hunter, Guyton worked at Dia:Chelsea as a guard.[3]
Guyton’s early “drawings,” from around 2003, are filled with black Xs over ripped-out sheets from 1960s design books and interior catalogues. The color black and the letter X became signature motifs.[4] His tool, however, is not the brush but an Epson Stylus Pro 4000/9600 inkjet printer, a machine used for large-format prints. Using a computer, Guyton produces abstract paintings: he designs the motifs on the computer and then puts them on canvas using the printer. The form of the rectangle is a function of the limits of the printer that creates the paintings. Since 2005, Guyton has worked primarily on canvas.[5] Typically Guyton’s work is exhibited in a series of evenly spaced, upright rectangles, all the same size, lining a gallery’s wall like lowered blinds.[6]
Guyton is often regarded as one of many contemporary painters revisiting late Modernism, alongside fellow painters Tomma Abts, Mark Grotjahn, Eileen Quinlan, Sergei Jensen, and Cheyney Thompson.[7]
In a statement of 2004, Guyton said:
Recently I've been using Epson inkjet printers and flatbed scanners as tools to make works that act like drawings, paintings, even sculptures. I spend a lot of time with books and so logically I've ended up using pages from books as material- pages torn from books and fed through an inkjet printer. I've been using a very pared down vocabulary of simple shapes and letters drawn or typed in Microsoft Word, then printed on top of these pages from catalogues, magazines, posters- and even blank canvas. The resulting images aren't exactly what the machines are designed for- slick digital photographs. There is often a struggle between the printer and my material- and the traces of this are left on the surface- snags, drips, streaks, mis-registrations, blurs.[8]
Art critic Holland Cotter, writing in The New York Times said that Guyton, "takes modernism, with its touchy-feely spiritual pretensions, for a hard ride. And as always he goes well beyond a one-line put-down."[9]
In 2005, Guyton collaborated on with fellow artist Kelley Walker on an exhibition which was also reviewed by The New York Times. Art critic Ken Johnson said:
Mr. Guyton and Mr. Walker use digital scanning, inkjet printing, photo-silk-screening and stenciling to create an inventory of images that they recycle in various ways. Swatches of silk-screen fabric used to produce some of the images have been turned into flags hanging from poles angled out from the walls. Partly overpainted images of knives, food, chicken bones, Ketel One vodka advertisements and people disembarking from a private airplane constitute a series of 26 canvases hung edge to edge.[10]
In 2003 Guyton showed at Power House Memphis. Between 2006-10 exhibitions of his work were held in Germany at Kunstverein Hamburg, Portikus,Frankfurt am Main, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne. In 2009, Guyton and Kelley Walker were invited by Daniel Birnbaum to participate at the Venice Biennale.
Guyton's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva.[11]