Wade guyton biography
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“I hated art as a kid. I didn't even like art class. I didn't like to draw. I would make my dad do all the drawings because I hated it so much.” So recalls the celebrated post-conceptual artist Wade Guyton, who soon found a way around his distaste for draughtsmanship by inventively misappropriating the common tools of our time––desktop computers, scanners, and inkjet printers––to realize works of uncommon monumentality, surface subtlety, and expressive force.
Guyton was born in Indiana in 1972 and grew up in Tennessee. Twice rejected from the Whitney Independent Study Program, he pursued an MFA at Hunter, where his instructors included Robert Morris, and further immersed himself in minimalist art working as a guard at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea for seven years. His early “drawings” date from around 2003 and are filled with black 'X'characters over excised book pages. This motif would become central to his canon, much of which is produced with a large-format Epson Stylus Pr
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Wade Guyton
It’s amazing that you can become one of the leading artists of your generation by messing with the limits of a home-office printer. That’s what 37-year-old artist Wade Guyton has managed to do ink-wise in the past decade.Guyton’s early “drawings,” from around 2003, when he started incorporating a desktop printer, are filled with striking black Xs over ripped-out sheets from ’60s design books and interior catalogues. The color black and the letter x became signature motifs. So did flames (even an ongoing black-markered series of Firestarter book covers), the letter u, MarcelBreuer chairs (he twisted a few into disfigured metal sculptures), circles, and lined grids. At some point, Guyton jumped from paper to linen, running—or rather, pulling—gigantic swathes of fabric through the ink-jet printer while it reads from a computer file. Guyton lets the printer cause the aberrations and pattern glitches that run across his muddy
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2025
Langen Foundation, Zeichnung, Malerei, staty, Fotografie, spelfilm, Video, Sound – Sammlung Ringier 1995–2025, curated bygd Wade Guyton and Beatrix Ruf, Neuss
2024
Edition VFO, Beyond Imagery, Zurich
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Form Matters, Matter Forms. From Readymade to Product Fetish, Winterthur
Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Between Pixel and Pigment. Hybrid Painting in Post-Digital Times, Bielefeld
MoMA, Post-Atomic Abstraction: Collection 1980s-Present, New York
Fondation Beyeler, Sommeraustellung, Riehen
2023
Gagosian, To böj the Ear of the Outer World – Conversations on contemporary abstract painting, London
mudac, Dialogue ingång une pieuvre et un presse-agrumes, Lausanne
Hammer Museum, Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Los Angeles
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Reaching for the Stars: From Maurizio Cattelan to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Florence
2022
David Zwirner &