Wade Guyton “Thirteen Paintings”
The Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo 
October 30, 2024 – March 16, 2025

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is pleased to dedicate its new show, Thirteen Paintings, to the American artist Wade Guyton. This exclusive exhibition is part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” programme, showcasing previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, thus fulfilling the Fondation’s commitment to engage in international projects and reach a broader audience. 

Wade Guyton is well-known for a conceptually rigorous body of work produced over more than two decades. His work spans a variety of media and materials: photography, sculpture, video, books, and works on paper. He is best known for large-scale paintings on canvas made with an inkjet printer, which have featured recurring iconic subjects such as the monochrome, flames, typed letters X and U, and the New York Times website. Guyton and his work have played a pivotal role in the artistic discourse around the advent of the digital age.

A central figure in the young New York scene since the early 2000s, Guyton continually eluded categorisation by first turning away from painting, and then by pulling away from abstraction. He combines traditional media – such as primed canvas – with digital printing processes, and the artefacts obtained by this deliberate misuse of technology lead to aesthetically surprising results. His radical project consists in redefining the field of pictorial experimentation and the notion of authorship, in the manner of Andy Warhol. In his own words, his works “are prints and not prints, photographs and not photographs, paintings and not paintings. The works are comfortable in this place of uncertainty. (…) How they are defined depends upon the point of view of the viewer.” 

Although echoing the structure and language of painting in the traditional sense, Guyton’s works radically modify the conventions and modes of production. His paintings, produced by putting canvases through large-format Epson inkjet printers several times to print motifs and letterings, are sprinkled with errors, drips, and misprints that are part of the general composition process and ensure the result’s uniqueness. The device becomes his paintbrush and signature: “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 in different electronic formats, these characters – they may also be images of a flame scanned from a book – have all become contemporary art icons.

This exhibition presents Untitled (2022), a suite of thirteen paintings which belong to the Collection and that are exhibited publicly for the first time. Some of the images include photographs the artist has taken of his studio on the Bowery in New York (USA), canvases lying on the floor, screenshots of the New York Times website, bitmap files, and wet ink from paintings in process. All the works are made using an Epson SureColor P9000 printer. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Japan.

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