WG3031

WG3031 is an artist’s book in which Wade Guyton prints one large painting at 1:1 scale and recomposes it across 360 pages, so that the volume reads as fragments of a single work.

Beatrix Ruf edited it, and JRP|Ringier published it in 2015 as a softcover with 360 color images, in a limited edition of 700 copies. The pages could in principle be joined to reconstruct the original painting. The publisher reads the book as a reflection on reproduction, the original and the source, and as a mise en abyme of the procedures behind Guyton’s paintings.

Guyton was born in Hammond, Indiana, in 1972 and lives and works in New York. He rose to prominence in the mid-2000s with abstract paintings of simple forms and letters printed on canvas, running the canvas through a commercial inkjet printer and pushing the machine past its capacity until it failed. He also makes drawings, sculptures and installations. His one-person museum exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012, Kunsthalle Zürich in 2013 and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2019.