“Then I kept looking at the structure and I realized, the metal was made from bending, and so I wondered what would happen, if I continued bending.”
– Wade Guyton, 2010
Over the past decade, Wade Guyton has rapidly risen to prominence by fusing the hand-made with the machine-made. Guyton explains, “I hated art as a kid. I didn’t even like art class. I didn’t like to draw.” (Wade Guyton in Conversation with David Armstrong, Interview Magazine, 2012) Accepting the limitations of his draftsmanship, Guyton instead became furiously interested in expanding the vocabulary of gesture and transposing “action” techniques associated with painting into the realm of sculpture. Thus, he takes actions to produce unsettling and arresting effects, tinkering and tricking while jamming, bunching and disarticulating material. Guyton’s interest in pushing the limitations of visual representation can be seen here in the present lot. Its chrome composition – a completely malleable medium – is twisted and turned, pulled and fixed, expanded and detracted in impossible ways.
In the early 2000s, Guyton retrieved a broken Marcel Breuer Cesca chair from an East Village sidewalk. He carried the chair home and began to grapple with the metal frame, twisting the frame into a minimalist sculpture. “I wanted to continue that bending process, and take it out of its temporary state of being a chair and into a sculpture” (S. Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, Whitney Museum of American Art: New York, 2012, p. 15). The chair, once a form for sitting, had been stripped of its seat and back, rendering it into a freestanding sculpture. By “unmaking” the chair, Guyton had extracted the metal from its utilitarian function and in fact created his own readymade. Guyton had set “free the chair from its condemnation to furniture.” (Wade Guyton in conversation with Christoph Platz, Artblog Cologne, April 2010).
