Guyton\Walker
Untitled
2010
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Guyton\Walker
Untitled
2010
Physical Qualities
Digital inkjet print on drywall, 27 sheets (each): 96 x 48 x 1/2 in. (243.8 x 121.9 x 1.3 cm.)
Credit Line
Fanny B. Thalheimer Memorial Fund
Object Number
2011.39.1-27
Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker have established careers of their own as individual painters, but when they collaborate, they put aside their personal styles to produce work as a third creative entity, Guyton\Walker. Not unlike artists of an earlier generation, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, the duo turns to their surroundings for content, appropriating images from magazines and catalogs. However, they update the approaches of those earlier artists by placing fresh fruit and other commonplace items on a digital scanner and using Photoshop to build compositions.
Guyton\Walker’s two-dimensional imagery is frequently outputted or applied to three-dimensional forms including paint cans, Formica tables, and sheets of drywall—materials found in artists’ studios, behind the scenes in galleries, or in home improvement stores. The artists’ casual, somewhat irreverent tone extends to the way they install their art. Stacks of plasterboard lean against the wall as if waiting to be arranged, occupying neither the traditional positions of a painting hung on the wall nor of a sculpture situated
on a pedestal. By adopting these strategies, Guyton\Walker steps into the gray zones between “fine art” and “design” and between process and finished product, finding freedom in that ambiguity to produce work that is not beholden to the usual rules and conventions of art-making and display.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by purchase, 2011; Greene Naftali Gallery, NY; the artists