Wade Guyton - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Wade Guyton’s Untitled, 2009, possesses the penumbral gray, delicate shading and subtle tonal variation of a charcoal drawing, yet the work is the product of an Epson UltraChrome inkjet printer. Characteristic of Guyton’s artistic lexicon, Untitled combines digital printing and manual intervention as the artist disrupts the calibrated printing process to create mechanical errors. These disruptions imbue the piece with material traces of Guyton’s presence. Untitled was created as part of a series of monochromes initially exhibited at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. This set of monochromes was produced using ink with exactly fifty-percent black saturation, resulting in soft grays and diaphanous inky strata. Scott Rothkopf goes as far to refer to these works as “more delicate and fragile than any in Guyton’s oeuvre.”i

     

    Guyton chose the cloudy shade of gray to mirror the gallery’s floor, creating parallels between his work and the late 1960s modernist interior. The thin ink exposes the texture of the painting ground, emphasizing the linen surface’s rough quality. Guyton switched from canvas to primed linen in 2005, as he felt the canvas possessed “romantic connotations”—the linen ground is thus a distancing from painterliness.ii Though the work possesses the soft haze of a watercolor painting, it is visibly bifurcated by a central seam indicative of the process of its making in which the same rectangle is printed twice. In this manner, the work is the sum of both technological production and human intervention, capitalizing on the seeming perfection of the mechanical process and the imperfection of the human one. The work’s nuanced hues and gradients, as well as its margins of empty space, are imposed by the artist, introducing elements of chance and unpredictability.

    “Despite their mechanical facture, these paintings feel more delicate and fragile than any in Guyton's oeuvre.”
    —Scott Rothkopf

    Since 2007, Guyton has produced his monochromes using a file of a black rectangle created in Photoshop. The black monochrome is a veritable icon of modern art. Famously, Kazimir Malevich claimed his 1915 Black Square was the first non-representational work and the culmination of the Modernist movement. A component of Malevich’s work was its transparency in terms of process, a strand which Guyton continues in his monochrome works. His process is self-evident in the discrepancies between the source image—a solid black rectangle—and the printed image riddled with flaws. His intentional misdirection, jamming and manipulation of the printer are evidence of the artist’s hand. Coupled with the random technical errors, his process is both aleatory and composed.

    “Paintings are too hard. The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems.”
    —Andy Warhol

    Guyton’s employment of seriality and machines calls attention to the processes of photoreproduction. While, traditionally, machines are used to achieve a precise and accurate result, the printed image is vulnerable to imperfection. By rejecting the antiseptic immaculateness of digital aesthetics, Guyton posits these defects as valuable transmutations that show the value of fallibility in art. The works elucidate the physical and visual properties of craft: tangible blemishes animate the work, insisting human fragility can endow a computational image with the frisson of art.

     

    i Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, New York, 2012, p. 35

    ii Wade Guyton in Wade Guyton OS, p. 21.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

    • Exhibited

      Deurle, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Wade Guyton, March 15–May 31, 2009

    • Literature

      Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, New York, 2012, no. 56b, p. 142 (Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, 2009 installation view illustrated)
      Yilmaz Dziewior, ed., Wade Guyton, Guyton\Walker, Kelley Walker, exh. cat., Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2013, p. 25 (Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, 2009 installation view illustrated)

342

Untitled

signed and dated "Wade Guyton 09" on the overlap
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen
84 x 69 in. (213.4 x 175.3 cm)
Executed in 2009, this work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

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Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024