Wade Guyton - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 12, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    The Epson 9600 UltraChrome Inkjet Printer – a 44"-wide format professional printer which is used to produce exceptionally high-quality photographs and graphic images suitable for commercial sale – is the singular tool that American artist Wade Guyton uses to generate his abstract paintings. Guyton is fully aware of the limitations of his artistic language but exploits them as products of mechanical reproduction, playing on the fact that "abstraction always already exists in and as reproduction". His paintings question modernist shibboleths of originality and authorship whilst paradoxically developing a wholly individual lexicon within the contemporary art scene. This lexicon is based, in Guyton's paintings, upon a simple vocabulary of shapes and letters formatted in Microsoft Word. Art historian Johanna Burton has described his vocabulary as "too easily generalized to be attributed to any singular context and, because of this, are not naturally of any context at all" (J. Burton, ‘Such Uneventful Events: The Work of Wade Guyton', in Formalism. Modern Art, today, exh. cat., Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2004, p. 59). This lack of definition in his marks and their openness to interpretation relates directly to the inevitable randomness of his technique. The artist acknowledges that the marks, blurs and smudges caused by dragging, when the linen canvas is folded and repeatedly fed or forced through the printer, are not only fundamental to the overall composition of the work but also reveal the process of the painting's formation."Guyton's X paintings assert themselves in a visual environment of mass-produced, instantaneously diffused imagery. But as Guyton acknowledges, the difficulty lies not so much in ‘saying there's no such thing as an original image, but knowing full well that it's not a very original thing to say'." (The artist, quoted in S. Rothkopf, ‘Modern Pictures', in Wade Guyton: Color, Power & Style, Cologne, 2007, p. 74).

1

Untitled

2006
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.
76.5 x 66 cm (30 × 26 in).
Signed and dated ‘Wade Guyton 2006' on the reverse.

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for £61,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

13 October 2010
London