Wade Guyton: Sculpture at Matthew Marks Gallery

Wade Guyton, born in 1972, is best known for paintings made by feeding linen through an ordinary Epson inkjet printer. The marks left by the machine, including smears, streaks and dropouts, become part of the image. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2023), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2019), the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013) and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2012). A solo show at Fondazione Prada in Milan follows next spring.

At Matthew Marks Gallery on West 22nd Street in Chelsea, the focus shifts to sculpture. The materials are varied: bronze, aluminum, stainless steel, plaster, plywood (Douglas fir) and carpeting. Each piece starts from an everyday object or structure drawn from the artist's own surroundings.

The sources include the coatroom counter at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; the travel frames used to move his paintings; a Tyvek-wrapped cardboard tube on which his large canvases are rolled; 3D images of sculptures he made twenty years ago; and a display structure left behind when a tile store moved out of his studio building. Curator Yilmaz Dziewior has noted that, as in the paintings and drawings, Guyton takes an existing image and turns it into something else. Here the image is three-dimensional, so appropriating it required fabricating it as an object.

The checklist includes several multi-part works from 2026: cast bronze in 15 and 17 parts, painted cast aluminum in 16 parts, and cast aluminum in 17 parts. Other works pair Epson UltraChrome HDX inkjet on linen with cast aluminum, including one from 2024–26 in six parts. Also on view are Untitled (Wrapped Chair Sculpture), in cast bronze and stainless steel, and Untitled (Wrapped U Sculpture v.5), in stainless steel and cast plaster. Two works combine Douglas fir with acoustic carpet, one of them with fluorescent lights. A group of recent inkjet paintings from 2025 and 2026 sits alongside the sculptures.

The exhibition opened with a reception on November 4 and runs through January 23, 2027. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. For viewers who know Guyton's paintings, it shows how the same method of transferring and reworking images plays out in three dimensions.