Catalogue dedicated to the series of paintings exhibited at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Wade Guyton's first exhibition in a French museum.
In 2022, the piece Untitled (2013) was added to the Museum of Modern Art's collections, thanks to an exceptional donation. This painting was the starting point around which the exhibition—the artist's first in a French museum—took shape. Created between 2013 and 2015, the five paintings bear witness to a brief period during which Guyton took a particular interest in the colour black. Four of them were incidentally designed from the same Photoshop file composed exclusively of black: the printed image competes with white, its reserve space. An ambiguous relationship thus develops, within each canvas, between figure and background, and more broadly, between the artworks and the Museum's wall accommodating them.
The book features texts by Julia Garimoth and Stéphanie Moisdon.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, October 13, 2023 – April 7, 2024.
Wade Guyton (born 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, lives a,d works in New York) is one of the most influential representatives of a generation of artists who reflect on and produce images in a digital era. Although some of his works question the structure and language of painting, in the traditional sense of the word, they still radically modify codes and modes of production. Guyton's paintings are indeed realized by putting canvases several times through huge inkjet printers to print motifs and letterings. Errors, drips, and misprints are part of the general composition process and ensure the result's unicity: "The first works I created digitally, it was like writing, but the keyboard replaced the pen. Instead of drawing an X, I decided to push a key." Repeated under different electronic formats, these signs—may they be Xs, Us, or even the image of a flame scanned from a book—have all become contemporary art icons.
