Wade Guyton rose to prominence in the mid-2000s with a landmark series of abstract paintings composed of simple forms and letters printed on canvas. Running the canvas through a commercial inkjet printer, Guyton stretched the device beyond its capacity to the point of failure, embedding the limits of a digital future onto the surfaces of his paintings. In his drawings, sculptures, and installations Guyton further explores the intersection of art, design, technology, and daily life. In recent years, his practice and imagery have expanded to address the ever-increasing presence of technology and its effects.
His work has been the subject of numerous one-person museum exhibitions including the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Serpentine Gallery in London, Le Consortium in Dijon, Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
[excerpted from Matthew Marks Gallery website: www.matthewmarks.com]
For the drawings included in this series, Guyton prints compositions onto torn pages of art books, melding his mark making and the published imagery together. These prints are then haphazardly piled and photographed on the floor of his New York studio, with the tripod of the camera and a random wire visible in the lower left corner. Guyton flattens the pictorial space and unites the three elements—wire, tripod leg, and drawings—with the slightly scratched rubber floor tiles. The composition suggests that the viewer is getting a rare glimpse into the artist’s studio practice, however staged the image may be.