Member’s Edition

Profisilk 250 g/m²; offset print
40 x 36,5 cm

available until December 15, 2024

It gives us great pleasure to introduce the Kunstverein’s member’s edition for 2024, which we are able to make available with the kind agreement of the New-York based artist Wade Guyton. Guyton’s offset print Untitled, 2002, Epsom DURABrite inkjet on book page, 10 3/8 x 7 3/8 inches, WG1777 dates from 2002. Its motif is made from a selection of images, which were part of his major retrospective at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2019–20.

Guyton was born in Hammond, Indiana in 1972 and currently lives in New York. His work comprises paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters, photographs and books. It exhibits a broad range of influences, including Pop, Minimal and Conceptual Art, architectural and design history, and also incorporates material from books and the Internet. His practice has often been described as a form of sampling, and he uses the same method to borrow from his own work. Guyton’s work is characterised by its use of analogue and digital printing and reproduction methods, and of inkjet printers in particular.

Since the 1990s, Guyton has used these methods to expand the possibilities of painting to a remarkable degree, and is one of the first artists to employ digital technology in the production of his paintings. His work is unique in having evolved a constantly developing vocabulary that encompasses both the digital and the handmade. It has given a new dimension of meaning to processes of automatic digital production, engaging in a balancing act between the artist’s control of his material and the uncontrollable dynamics specific to the process of printing. Guyton uses this material and this technology to generate images that are without precedent. Part of their fascination consists in the fact that it remains unclear exactly how they have been manipulated.

Guyton overprints both canvases and pages torn out of books. These are often books on architecture, as is the case with this member’s edition. Guyton relates that while he was an art student in Tennessee he had few opportunities to see artworks in the original; in these circumstances, books became a means for broadening his horizons.

In 2002 he started making works on paper by taking pages torn from books and using an inkjet printer to overprint them with patterns consisting of elements such as stripes, while making no attempt to influence their positioning on the page. Guyton, who also collects books, often cannibalises his own collection to produce these “drawings”, as he calls these works. This member’s edition is an actual size photograph of the original work, which is taken from Hermann Phelps’ Deutsche Fachwerkbauten in the Blaue Bücher series. It shows the town hall in Markgrönigen, built in the Alemannic style, with its slender, rhythmically ordered half-timbering.

Wade Guyton has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2023), Matthew Marks, New York (2023), Chantal Crousel, Paris (2023), Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (2022), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019), the Galerie Giesela Capitain, Cologne (2018, 2014), Francesca Pia, Zurich (2018, 2011), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2017), the Aspen Art Museum (2017), Le Consortium, Dijon (2016), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Kunstalle Zurich (2013), the Kunsthaus Bregrenz (2013), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012), the Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle (2009) and the Portikus, Frankfurt (2008), among others.

Order modalities
The member’s edition is reserved exclusively for members of the Kölnischer Kunstverein.
The member’s edition will be sent to you by mail.
The order is only possible via the form on our website.
Order period: January 02 until December 15, 2024.
Production costs rate: 15,-€ per member’s edition (plus 7,-€ shipping fee / Shipping costs for other EU countries are 15,- €).

Family members can have the member’s edition sent to them collectively. The shipping fee (6,-€) then only has to be paid once. Please note this in the Comments field.