Comprising more than eighty works, the exhibition features highlights of Guyton's career from 1999 to the present, showcasing the breadth of his work in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, installation and two new paintings, one of which spans fifty feet in length and is the artist's largest single canvas to date. The show features a dramatic, non-chronological layout in which staggered rows of parallel walls confront the viewer like the layered pages of a book or stacked windows on a computer screen.
curated by Scott Rothkopf
NEW YORK, July 23, 2012 – This fall the Whitney Museum of American Art will present Wade
Guyton OS, the first midcareer survey of the influential New York–based artist. Opening October 4, the
exhibition will feature highlights of Guyton’s career from 1999 to the present, showcasing the breadth of
his work in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Guyton will also premiere two
new paintings, one of which spans fifty feet in length and is the artist’s largest single canvas to date. The
exhibition is organized by Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf, in close collaboration with the artist, and
will occupy the third-floor Peter Norton Family Galleries through January 13, 2013. This is Guyton’s
first prominent solo museum exhibition in the United States, and the accompanying catalogue is his first
comprehensive monograph.
Comprising more than eighty works, the show will feature a dramatic, non-chronological layout in
which staggered rows of parallel walls confront the viewer like the layered pages of a book or stacked
windows on a computer screen, twin references to Guyton’s sources and process. Drawing on his flair
for installation, this approach will recontextualize more than a decade’s worth of his art with new pieces
made specifically for the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer building—a fitting venue given Guyton’s
longstanding engagement with Breuer’s work. These large-scale paintings will be exhibited alongside
rows of vitrines housing eighty-five of Guyton’s “printer drawings,” while a spectacular installation of
more than eighteen mirrored stainless steel sculptures will span the gallery space. The exhibition’s title
Wade Guyton OS employs the commonly used acronym for a computer “operating system” and links
Guyton’s work to the technological tools on which he depends. The title makes the point that the artist’s
body of work is more closely akin to an open-ended system than to a fixed corpus, a point underscored
by the exhibition’s highly inventive design.
Wade Guyton OS builds on the Museum’s early commitment to this groundbreaking artist. Guyton was
included in the 2004 Biennial, and work purchased by the Museum from that show marked his first entry
into the collection of a public institution. The Whitney has since acquired a majestic eight-panel painting
that will be a highlight of this show. In 2010, Guyton\Walker, a collaborative team comprising Guyton
and Kelley Walker, launched Whitney on Site: New Commissions Downtown, a series of projects on the
site of the future Whitney building at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets, adjacent to the
High Line.
By showcasing Guyton at this pivotal moment in his development, the Whitney reaffirms its
longstanding tradition of championing pioneering artists early in their careers. This survey places
Guyton alongside Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince, all
of whom were presented in Whitney surveys covering roughly the first decade of their work.
About the Artist
Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, and now lives and works in New York. Over the
past decade he has emerged as one of the most innovative artists of a generation that also includes
Rachel Harrison, Kelley Walker, Josh Smith, and Roe Etheridge. During that time, Guyton pioneered a
body of work that builds elegantly on key developments in the history of modern and contemporary art
through the use of common technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and printer. With these
tools, Guyton forges a seamless and eloquent synthesis of diverse mediums and movements within a
technical and visual vocabulary that is insistently of our time.
Guyton first gained prominence in the mid-2000s with a group of drawings made by passing pages torn
primarily from old art and architecture books through his Epson inkjet printer and marking them with
letters and geometric shapes rendered simply in Microsoft Word. In these works, colored bars and disks,
muscular Us and Xs, and, eventually, scanned graphics, piled atop images of timber-frame houses,
Constructivist sculptures, Persian rugs, and modish interiors through an activity that implies both
vandalism and homage. Within each sheet, Guyton suggests his intimacy with and distance from his
subjects, as well as the recalcitrance and creeping obsolescence of the printed book in the digital era. At
the same time, Guyton questions how an age-old medium such as drawing might itself be redefined
intuitively through new means.
Since 2005, Guyton has developed a unique approach to painting by running sheets of primed linen
through a large-format inkjet printer to yield a variety of motifs from off-kilter abstractions to fiery
emblems. Because the fabric is thicker than the printer’s intended support, it often gets stuck in the
machine or causes clogs of ink that result in drips, smears, and striations. Similarly, Guyton’s
enlargement or mis-formatting of a digital source file can cause the image to blur or break down as it
wends its way from the computer to the printer. He often tugs at the linen or overprints his mistakes;
these accidents become a source of painterly interest and a subject of Guyton’s art, poignantly
connecting it to our daily lives, now punctuated by jammed copiers and misprinted cellphone photos. In
this sense, his canvases become subtle maps of both the failure and possibility inherent in his novel
processes—and in all artistic and technological pursuits.
Guyton’s recent paintings have taken on an architectural scale and spatial dynamism, with multiple
panels stretching fifty feet wide or twenty-five feet tall. This environmental approach suggests his
involvement with Minimal, Conceptual, and installation-based practices, in addition to his creative
refashioning of Pop and Pictures-era appropriation. Guyton’s practice also comprises sculptures that
extend his graphic interventions into space, as in his series of reflective steel objects in the shape of the
letter U and in a group of towering rough-hewn wooden Xs. Other sculptures, such as those made from
the bent tubular metal frames of iconic Marcel Breuer chairs, playfully merge the legacies of modern
sculpture and design. Examples of these series will be integrated into the exhibition to create a
contrapuntal narrative between Guyton’s paintings and drawings and his more insistently three-
dimensional work.
In addition to Guyton’s solo practice, he creates work with Kelley Walker under the moniker
Guyton\Walker and is a member of the collaborative Continuous Project with Bettina Funcke, Joseph
Logan, and Seth Price. Guyton is also a partner in The Leopard Press, a publishing house based in New
York.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published in cooperation with Yale
University Press. The catalogue includes a scholarly overview of Guyton’s career by Whitney curator
Scott Rothkopf, as well as an interview with the artist, conducted by Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s
Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs. This volume will serve as Guyton’s first
comprehensive monograph.
Exhibition Support
Generous support for Wade Guyton OS is provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum
of American Art, Candy and Michael Barasch, Allison and Warren Kanders, Miyoung Lee and Neil
Simpkins, and IPPOLITA.
Significant support is provided by Mike De Paola, Erin and Peter Friedland, Marie-Josée and Henry
Kravis, Tony Salamé: Aïshti foundation, Constance R. Caplan, Nina and Frank Moore, Suzi and
Andrew B. Cohen, Brigitte and Arend Oetker, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Barbara and Howard
Morse, and The Cowles Charitable Trust.
About the Whitney
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and
contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the Whitney is
celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection, which comprises over
19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential
artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature exhibition, has
become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its
landmark exhibitions, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of
exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation.
Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed
on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th Street and, in
1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper
East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is moving
forward with a new building project, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the
corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the
High Line, the new building, which has generated immense momentum and support, will enable the
Whitney to vastly increase the size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was
broken on the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.
Image: Wade Guyton (b. 1972), Untitled, 2010. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen; 84 × 69 in. (213.4 × 175.3 cm). Collection of the artist. © Wade Guyton. Photograph by Lamay Photo
Press Office Contact
pressoffice@whitney.org
(212) 570-3633
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Press conference: Wednesday, October 3, 2012 10 am–12 pm Remarks at 11 am by the artist and curator Scott Rothkopf.
The Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York City
Museum hours are: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
General admission: $18. Full-time students and visitors ages 19–25 and 62 & over: $12. Visitors 18
& under and Whitney members: FREE. Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 p.m.