Wade Guyton (born 1972) is an American post-conceptual artist who among other things makes digital paintings on canvas using scanners and digital inkjet technology.

Guyton was born in Hammond, Indiana, in 1972, and grew up in the small town of Lake City, Tennessee. His father, who died when Guyton was two, and his stepfather, also deceased, were both steelworkers. Guyton's mother, a homemaker, sometimes worked as a secretary at the Catholic church the family attended.^[1] Guyton received a BA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1995. He moved to New York in 1996. Twice rejected for admission to the Whitney Independent Study Program,^[1] he attended Hunter College's MFA program from 1996 to 1998.^[2]

While a student at Hunter College, Guyton counted Robert Morris among his teachers. Guyton first got a job at St. Mark's Bookshop in the East Village and then worked at Dia:Chelsea as a guard.^[3] When Dia closed its Chelsea space in 2004, his severance pay allowed him to continue renting an East Village studio and apartment without having to look for another job.^[4] He won the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004).^[5]

In 2003, Guyton showed at Power House Memphis. Between 2004-14 exhibitions of his work were held at Kunstverein Hamburg; Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Wiener Secession, Vienna; Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich. In 2005, then-MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach included Guyton's inkjet panels in a room with fellow newcomers Seth Price and Josh Smith.^[14] The following year, curators Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist included Guyton/Walker's brightly colored stacks of paint cans in their "Uncertain States of America" survey at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo.^[14]

In 2009, Guyton and Kelley Walker were invited by Birnbaum to participate at the Venice Biennale, where they exhibited canvases and pieces of drywall at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni.^[15] For his 2012 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Guyton created walls inspired by temporary partitions Marcel Breuer had made for the building in the 1960s.^[11]

In 2019, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany organized a twenty-year retrospective of the artist. It was the artist’s third exhibition at the museum which has one of the largest collections of the artist’s works to date. The exhibition curated by Yilmaz Dziewior included 200 paintings, sculptures, a survey of works on paper, early photography and recent bronze sculptures. The exhibition catalogue was published by Verlag Walther Koenig. ^[16]

In an interview with Nicolas Trembley, Guyton says of the unusual organization of the exhibition, “It was the building that refused the chronological show, since some paintings need particular walls to be shown against. From there the exhibition could develop in a more unusual way, picking up lots of loose conceptual threads and temporarily making thematic narratives, or performing a more conventional pedagogical function. I also needed to figure out a way to keep myself interested in looking at all this old work, because this kind of retrospective thinking can sometimes get a little bit boring.”

^[17]

In 2021, Guyton presented “The Undoing”, a suite of 26 paintings documenting the artist’s experience during the pandemic.

Guyton started the paintings in The Undoing during the lockdown in 2020. Images include news from the New York Times website, the artist taking his temperature, and photographs taken during Guyton’s exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, which closed just before the start of the pandemic. The paintings were exhibited again at Glenstone Museum in Potomac in 2022.

^[18][19]

Guyton's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Princeton University Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; FRAC, Ile de France; and the Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva.^[20]

As of 2013, Guyton's works regularly sell for more than $1 million at auction and privately.^[21] An untitled Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen of 2005 established an auction record for the artist when it sold for $2.4 million at Christie's New York in 2013.^[22] In 2014, his flame painting Untitled (Fire, Red/Black U) (2005) sold to an unidentified telephone bidder for $3.525 million at Christie's, New York. Days before the auction the artist disgusted by the enormous price expected went on the offensive printing multiple copies of the painting and posted them on Instagram a few days before the auction ^[23] The painting was rumored to be guaranteed at $4 million.^[24]

Guyton’s works along with Rudolf Stingel and Christopher Wool were at the center of the Inigo Philbrick case in which collectors were defrauded.

^[25][26]

Guyton works with Matthew Marks Gallery from New York, Galleria Gió Marconi in Milan, Galerie Gisela Capitain from Cologne, Galerie Francesca Pia from Zurich and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris.^[27]

• Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2006 Color, Power & Style, ISBN 978-3-86560-089-9
• Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2010 Zeichnungen für ein großes Bild, ISBN 978-3-86560-814-7

• Inkjet technology