FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 23, 6 – 8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce "Color, Power & Style," an exhibition of work by Wade Guyton. The show will feature recent paintings by the artist.

Wade Guyton's paintings assume the structure and appearance of paintings in the traditional sense, yet also conjure a re-formation and re-structure of art today. Like his ongoing series of "printer drawings," produced by overprinting pages from art books with simple patterns using an inkjet printer, Guyton feeds primed linen through a large-format printer numerous times. In this new series, Guyton has dramatically increased the scale of his paintings by utilizing a new process of folding the linen, creating a sharp seam-like bifurcation. The blurs, runs, and smudges that result, often characterized as printer error, play an important role in the overall composition of the work.

The paintings in the show incorporate scanned pictures of flames and stripes, squares, points, and holes drawn in the computer, and typed U's and X's. Art historian Johanna Burton, referring to his visual lexicon, writes that "they are too easily generalized to be attributed to any singular context and, because of this, are not naturally of any context at all." These marks are resolutely undefined and open to interpretation. The significance of the original imagery, however, is determined and it is the deconstruction of the pieces that "explore the limitations of transformation."

Guyton has been exhibited both in the United States and internationally, most recently with a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Hamburg. He will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich and was included in Greater New York at P.S. 1—MOMA, Long Island City, in 2005; the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2004; and Kontext, Form, Troja at the Secession, Vienna, 2003.

Wade Guyton was born in 1972 in Hammond, Indiana. He received his BA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his MFA from Hunter College, New York. The artist currently lives and works in New York City.

This will be Wade Guyton's first solo exhibition with Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The exhibition will open on Thursday, February 23, with a reception from 6-8 p.m. and will remain on view through March 25. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.