Wade Guyton - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Wednesday, November 16, 2016 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Giò Marconi, Milan
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Milan, Giò Marconi, Wade Guyton, January 29 - March 19, 2009

  • Catalogue Essay

    "All the artists I was interested in were involved with the manipulation of language or the malleability of the categories of art. There was a freedom in this way of thinking. There was a space where objects could be speculative." Wade Guyton

    Wade Guyton's Untitled, 2009 is an iconic work by one of the most important artists of the current generation. The painting boldly depicts the artist's trademark “X” form, printed in blue with an Epson UltraChrome inkjet printer. Informed by chance and exploring the essence and limits of mechanization, Untitled also examines what it means to be a painter in the twenty-first century. Guyton challenges the limits of painting by almost entirely removing his hand from the production of the work. Similar to Duchamp, Guyton blurs the boundaries between "high" and "low," re-inventing appropriation in a new minimalist language.

    A student of Robert Morris during his MFA at Hunter College in New York, Guyton admired his professor’s conceptual approach and his pioneering of Minimalist theory. He was drawn instinctively to artists who used art as an open-ended platform for thought and exploration. Guyton recalls, “All the artists I was interested in were involved with the manipulation of language or the malleability of the categories of art. There was a freedom in this way of thinking. There was a space where objects could be speculative.” (Wade Guyton: OS, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012-2013, p. 11). In this way, Guyton follows in the storied tradition of radically reestablishing the bounds of what painting is or could be, similar to what Kazimir Malevich accomplished with his Suprematist paintings, such as 1914’s Black Cross, which eschewed anything natural for the purely geometric.

    Archetypal of Guyton’s oeuvre, the formal and conceptual identities of Untitled are defined by the spontaneity of its mechanical fabrication. As an elegantly made and brutally efficient analysis of the limits and restraints of creative production, Untitled is a testament to the vivacity of painting now, then, and forever.

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Untitled

signed and dated "Guyton 2009" on the overlap
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen
84 1/4 x 69 in. (214 x 175.3 cm.)
Executed in 2009.

Estimate
$1,200,000 - 1,500,000 

Sold for $1,990,000

Contact Specialist
Kate Bryan
Head of Evening Sale
New York
+ 1 212 940 1267

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 16 November 5 PM EST