Executed just two years after Wade Guyton began experimenting with the Epson printer as a tool for investigating the traditional bounds of painting, Untitled, 2004, is a stellar, early example of the artist’s signature and enduring body of work. Over the past two decades, Guyton has continued to explore this mechanized medium, in which he pulls linen through a digital printer, embracing chance, spontaneity, and error in his final compositions. In the present lot, which hangs unstretched on the wall, imperfect rectangles overlap, just barely border one another, and fade, candidly recording the printer’s every jam, smudge, and blemish. In discussing Guyton’s unique process, Museum of Modern Art, New York, curator Ann Temkin notes, “You tap a keyboard with one finger and this very large painting emerges. It’s gone against everything we think of as a painting…Pollock flung it; Rauschenberg silkscreened it; Richter took a squeegee; Polke used chemicals. Wade is working in what by now is a pretty venerable tradition, against the conventional idea of painting” (Ann Temkin quoted in ‘Painting, Rebooted,’ The New York Times, September 27, 2012, online). Untitled, 2004, is an important, early example of Guyton’s continued interest in the notion of what it means to be an artist – or painter – in the twenty-first century.