Wade Guyton – Siamo arrivati in forma abbreviata

Mostra personale

Comunicato stampa

Giò Marconi is pleased to announce Wade Guyton’s third solo exhibition with the gallery: Siamo arrivati, in forma abbreviata.

Siamo arrivati, Guyton’s first solo show in a public Italian institution, the Museo Madre in Naples, was on view earlier this year. There the artist used the museum as a studio and worked in the galleries for two months producing new works.

At the end of the exhibition, the ten largest works could not fit through the doors of the museum and needed to be unstretched and rolled. Guyton used the gallery in Milan to re-stretch these works and decided to show these ten paintings together. Taken out of the original installation in Naples, the experience of these works is concentrated.

These paintings include images of the museum’s galleries that Guyton used as a studio, the windows he asked the museum to reveal, the temporary Wi-Fi routers installed on the walls, works in progress on the floor, a page of the online edition of Il Mattino, a night view of via Giovanni Nicotera where the artist lived, enlarged fragments of digital bitmap files, and the towels used to soak up excess ink. One painting is a black monochrome comprised of rejected layers of imagery.

The museum stated:

In these works, however, the equilibrium between representation and abstraction becomes precarious, oscillating between photography and painting, with their respective representational codes. The aim seems indeed to transform them into embryonic and hybrid icons, into palimpsests of the contemporary digital episteme. Produced in almost real time by the artist and his team while the exhibition was being mounted, these works express the potential and contradictions of contemporary digital visual language – in which abstraction and representation, the daily chronicle and suspension of time, identity and reproducibility, singularity and multiplicity overlap. They document the expansion and diversification of the ways in which digital language shapes our knowledge of reality, like the statutes of reality itself – which have become ephemeral, hypothetical, artificial and merely virtual.

...

Arranged by the artist within the third floor of Madre, these works transform the solidity and the authority of the museum space into a welcoming place of daily work, a malleable and rewritable architectural loop. The exhibition interconnects with architecture according to the rhythmic series of paintings and work tools (tables, furniture) that are reconceived by the artist and his team into devices for the exhibition itself. Like the transformation of the rooms of the museum into a workshop, which temporarily replaces his studio in New York, the residency of the artist and his team in Naples becomes the conceptual blueprint of a critical and (self-) analytical space-time framework. This is Guyton’s setting for creating this new group of works in real time; he defines the practical conditions of work and the technological resources required to gain access to the sources of information and, therefore, of representation and production. In this way, Guyton reinterprets both the classic art-historical theme of the “studio” and the possible reference to the tradition of the Grand Tour: This also could explain the ironic and self-ironic plural title of the exhibition, SIAMO ARRIVATI (“We Have Arrived”), which is taken from the slogan used by McDonald’s to announce the recent opening of its restaurants in Naples.

One could think of Guyton's residency and exhibition in Naples as a potential allegory of the contemporary digital and global inter- and hyper-connection, and that he performs the possible outcomes by making a comparison with the history of a city situated at the center of the Mediterranean and therefore immersed, in itself, in thousands of layers of social, economic, political and cultural interconnections.

Wade Guyton (b.Hammond, Indiana, 1972; lives and works in New York) received his BA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and attended Hunter College’s MFA program in New York.

Selected solo exhibitions include Serpentine Galleries, London (2017); Museo Madre, Naples (2017); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2017); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva (2016-2017); Le Consortium, Dijon (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Kunsthalle Zurich (2013); Kunsthaus Bregenz (together with Kelley Walker) (2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012-2013); Secession, Vienna (2011); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2010); Portikus, Frankfurt (2008).

Recent group exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2017); mumok, museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, Vienna (2016); Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2016); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013); Venice Biennale (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012); Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2012); Dallas Museum of Art (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011).