.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Created for an exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop in 2014, the present work is an elegant example of Wade Guyton’s stripe paintings. Its vertical red and green stripes are derived from the endpaper of an Italian design book, and printed using the artist’s trademark technique of inkjet on canvas. This pattern has circulated through Guyton’s body of work since 2004 as part of a repertoire of distinctive motifs, alongside his signature Us, Xs and flames. Scanned as a digital image and blown up to large scale, the endpaper takes on a new life. The red appears solid, while the green—printed originally as a melange of yellow, blue and black—breaks up into a grain reminiscent of woven linen. These textures in turn interact with the weave of the primed canvas beneath. Towards the top of the painting, the stripes end in a tear before a field of pristine white. This ripped edge is a remarkable trompe-l’oeil illusion, and a reminder of the paper origins of the image. Guyton showed four stripe paintings at the Josef Albers Museum, where they interacted with works by Albers he had chosen from the museum’s collection.
Guyton first hit upon the idea of having a printer ‘paint’ for him in 2002. He had studied at Hunter College in New York under the conceptual artist and theorist Robert Morris, and worked for seven years as a guard at Dia Art Foundation: he was sensitive to art and its conditions of display, but had little interest in traditional painterly techniques. By using the Epson printer as a tool—at first on a small scale and later on large canvases—he arrived at a fertile new mode which, wrote Peter Schjeldahl, ‘strangely rejuvenates the aesthetic philosophy, and the dramatic beauty, of classical abstract painting’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Man and Machine: A Wade Guyton Retrospective’, The New Yorker, 15 April 2012, p. 94). He worked with images found by chance, creating self-reflexive pictures that record the process of their making and the slippages and limits of their technology. Many of his paintings bear a vertical seam where a large sheet of linen has been folded in half and pulled twice through the jaws of the printer. The present vertical canvas was printed in one pass, using a 64-inch large-format Epson Stylus Pro 11880.
Guyton’s work operates in close dialogue with twentieth-century modernism. His first iterations of the stripe pattern were printed onto pages torn from art and design books, overlaying images of buildings, sculptures or paintings by artists such as Frank Stella. The stripe motif itself evokes Minimalist artworks, and the stripes used by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren. When Guyton blew the image up to make paintings, he also switched from using raw canvas—as he had for his flat typographic motifs—to a smooth, primed linen that could better register fine photographic detail. Despite his use of digital machines, Guyton is a lover of printed matter who attends closely to materiality and texture. His stripes are presented with a white margin above or below them, often revealing the endpaper’s torn edge. Many also incorporate wrinkles and ripples that are artefacts of the printing process, furthering the play of flatness and illusion.
‘Even if we are unaware that the pattern comes from the inside covers of a paperback book,’ writes Scott Rothkopf, ‘the uneven tear subtly announces it as a design—indeed, as a physical thing—not of Guyton’s creation but literally ripped from the graphic and material stuff of the world. These are stripes but also, the torn edge reminds us, a picture of stripes, and the reciprocities and distinctions between the two hit at the very core of his art’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Modern Pictures’, in T. Griffin (ed.), Writings on Wade Guyton, Zürich 2018, pp. 54-55). Guyton has continually reprised the pattern in vertical and horizontal formats and on a wide range of scales. Different versions have appeared in many of his most important exhibitions, including mural-sized examples in his retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012) and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019-2020). ‘It’s interesting for me to take something so insignificant and minor and affectless on its own’, he has said, ‘and let it permeate in many different ways’ (W. Guyton quoted in C. Vogel, ‘Painting, Rebooted’, The New York Times, 30 September 2012, p. AR1).
Guyton first hit upon the idea of having a printer ‘paint’ for him in 2002. He had studied at Hunter College in New York under the conceptual artist and theorist Robert Morris, and worked for seven years as a guard at Dia Art Foundation: he was sensitive to art and its conditions of display, but had little interest in traditional painterly techniques. By using the Epson printer as a tool—at first on a small scale and later on large canvases—he arrived at a fertile new mode which, wrote Peter Schjeldahl, ‘strangely rejuvenates the aesthetic philosophy, and the dramatic beauty, of classical abstract painting’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Man and Machine: A Wade Guyton Retrospective’, The New Yorker, 15 April 2012, p. 94). He worked with images found by chance, creating self-reflexive pictures that record the process of their making and the slippages and limits of their technology. Many of his paintings bear a vertical seam where a large sheet of linen has been folded in half and pulled twice through the jaws of the printer. The present vertical canvas was printed in one pass, using a 64-inch large-format Epson Stylus Pro 11880.
Guyton’s work operates in close dialogue with twentieth-century modernism. His first iterations of the stripe pattern were printed onto pages torn from art and design books, overlaying images of buildings, sculptures or paintings by artists such as Frank Stella. The stripe motif itself evokes Minimalist artworks, and the stripes used by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren. When Guyton blew the image up to make paintings, he also switched from using raw canvas—as he had for his flat typographic motifs—to a smooth, primed linen that could better register fine photographic detail. Despite his use of digital machines, Guyton is a lover of printed matter who attends closely to materiality and texture. His stripes are presented with a white margin above or below them, often revealing the endpaper’s torn edge. Many also incorporate wrinkles and ripples that are artefacts of the printing process, furthering the play of flatness and illusion.
‘Even if we are unaware that the pattern comes from the inside covers of a paperback book,’ writes Scott Rothkopf, ‘the uneven tear subtly announces it as a design—indeed, as a physical thing—not of Guyton’s creation but literally ripped from the graphic and material stuff of the world. These are stripes but also, the torn edge reminds us, a picture of stripes, and the reciprocities and distinctions between the two hit at the very core of his art’ (S. Rothkopf, ‘Modern Pictures’, in T. Griffin (ed.), Writings on Wade Guyton, Zürich 2018, pp. 54-55). Guyton has continually reprised the pattern in vertical and horizontal formats and on a wide range of scales. Different versions have appeared in many of his most important exhibitions, including mural-sized examples in his retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012) and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019-2020). ‘It’s interesting for me to take something so insignificant and minor and affectless on its own’, he has said, ‘and let it permeate in many different ways’ (W. Guyton quoted in C. Vogel, ‘Painting, Rebooted’, The New York Times, 30 September 2012, p. AR1).