Wade Guyton

Wade Guyton
Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2008
Born	1972 Hammond, Indiana
Nationality	USA
Field	Conceptual art, installation art, painting
Training	University of Tennessee

Wade Guyton (born 1972, Hammond, Indiana) is a post-conceptual American artist who makes digital paintings on canvas using scanners and digital inkjet technology.

Life and career

Guyton received a BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1995 and an MFA from Hunter College, New York, in 1998.^[1] While a student at Hunter, Guyton first got a job at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village and then worked at Dia:Chelsea as a guard.^[2] When Dia closed its Chelsea space in 2004, his severance pay was generous enough to allow him to continue renting an East Village studio and apartment without having to look for another job.^[3]

Artistic practice

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 in Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop and then puts them on canvas, book pages, exhibition invitations, and plywood using the printer.^[5] 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.^[6] 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.^[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]

Artist associations

Guyton also makes collaborative works with fellow artist Kelley Walker. Along with artists like Walker, Seth Price and Tauba Auerbach, Guyton is regarded by some to be at the forefront of a generation that has been reconsidering both appropriation art and abstract art through the 21st-century lens of digital technology.^[9] He is regarded as one of many contemporary painters revisiting late Modernism, alongside Tomma Abts, Mark Grotjahn, Eileen Quinlan, Sergei Jensen, and Cheyney Thompson.^[10]

Critical response

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."^[11]

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.^[12]

Exhibitions

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, where they printed scanned bananas and Southern California beach colors on canvases and slabs of drywall at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.^[13] For his 2012 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Guyton created partial walls inspired by temporary partitions Marcel Breuer had made for the building in the 1960s.^[14]

Collections

Guyton's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva.^[15]

Art market

As of 2013, Guyton's works regularly sell for more than $1 million at auction and privately.^[16] An untitled Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen of 2005 established an auction record for the artist when it sold for $2.4 million at Christie's New York in 2013.^[17]

Literature

• Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2006 Color, Power & Style, ISBN 978-3-86560-089-9
• Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2010 Zeichnungen für ein großes Bild, ISBN 978-3-86560-814-7

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wade Guyton.

• Guyton at Friedrich Petzel
• Interview