Background
Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, United States. His father was a steelworker and his mother, a homemaker, sometimes served as a secretary at the Catholic church.
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, United States
University of Tennessee
695 Park Ave, New York, NY 10065, United States
Hunter College
535 West 22nd Street, 4th Fl New York, NY 10011, United States
Dia Art Foundation
Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana, United States. His father was a steelworker and his mother, a homemaker, sometimes served as a secretary at the Catholic church.
Since 1990 till 1995, Wade studied at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, graduating with Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1996, he entered the Hunter College in New York, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1998. Robert Morris was one of his teachers at the college.
Early in his career, Guyton worked at St. Mark's Bookshop in the East Village. Some time later, he started to work as a guard at Dia Art Foundation, a post he held till 2004.
In his early work, Guyton used a desktop printer to lay black X-shapes, which would become his signature mark, over pages, taken from interior design catalogues. His work recycles images, using inkjet printing, photo silk screening and stenciling to imitate Abstract painting. For his series of large-scale untitled works from 2007–2008, Guyton printed black ink on pieces of stretched linen, using an Epson 9600 printer. These works appear to follow the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, but the inconsistencies on the surface of the canvases depend on the amount of ink in the printer, not on the artist’s hand.
In 2009, Wade took part in the Venice Biennale, where he exhibited his canvases and pieces of drywall. Some time later, in 2012, the retrospective of his works took place at the Whitney Museum.
The artist took part in many solo and group exhibitions, including those, held at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2009), Galleria Gió Marconi in Milan (2009) and others. Currently, he lives and works in New York City.
Quotations:
"As I was walking down the stairs, I kept thinking that the room felt like a movie theater with all your attention on this wall, so it seemed like a big challenge."
"Being an artist is supposed to be a scam, not a career."
"I'm always looking at the computer. I make all of my work on the computer at some point or another. Almost all of the paintings come from a file."
"When I was younger and was working as a Dia guard I would go to see everything. I went to every opening. I was really interested in seeing and learning as much as I could."
"I think as a student I ended up liking so many different and conflicting things."
"The Internet has a lot of solutions. I found an insane way to trap chipmunks - it was too crazy not to try."
"I had no idea what to expect moving to New York. It's embarrassing to say, but I didn't even realize that people bought contemporary art...that people actually paid for it...I know that's really dumb. I was really naive. I had no idea artists made money."
"It seemed to me that a lot of people started going to art school recently because they thought they could be famous and make a lot of money. They might be in for a bad turn."