Greene Naftali is pleased to present the second New York solo exhibition of the artist, Guyton\Walker. This show is concurrent with an exhibition in Paris at Air de Paris and the artist’s participation in the exhibition Making Worlds, curated by Daniel Birnbaum for the 53rd Venice Biennale. Guyton\Walker has had recent major solo exhibitions at the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy; LAX Art, Los Angeles; and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University.

Guyton\Walker, functioning as an autonomous artist, treats the individual artistic styles of Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker as any other image to be incorporated, interfered with, and appropriated. This collaborative engine exercises a freedom to extend and interrogate ideas of authorship, production, commodity and distribution. Using a contemporary cut-and-paste method of appropriation, Guyton\Walker makes visible the mechanical technologies at work such as flatbed scanning, silk-screening, and inkjet-printing directly onto raw surfaces. Tropical fruits, checkerboard backgrounds, gradients and pools of color are cross-sectioned, warped, sliced, and overlapped as images circulate between media, translating patterns from contents to container, from support to façade.

Treating images with a sculptural sensibility, Guyton\Walker makes comprehensive interventions into the gallery space. Both encompassing and fragmentary, their arrangements include the viewer in an environment that eludes resolution. Inkjet-printed sheets of drywall are parasitically attached to the gallery walls and sides of crates. Silk-screened canvases line the walls, leaning against labeled paint cans. Strands of cast coconuts hang from the ceilings as chandeliers. Facsimiles of a paint can are stretched along the entryway, and a series of monochromes cuts diagonally through the main gallery. By visually structuring the room, these dynamic obstructions suggest new spatial and psychological dimensions.

For this exhibition, Guyton\Walker introduces several new elements into their installations including tables made of printed Formica, patterned drinking glasses, sheets of drywall set in industrial lifts, and wooden travel crates used as architectural structures. Like the coconut chandeliers, the printed tables and glasses serve simultaneously as high-end design objects and visual material appropriated into the artist’s sculptural installations. The large drywall lifts, while serving a constructive function, also recall commercial billboards. Spotted with empty aluminum paint cans, these installations transform the exhibition space, suggesting situations at once brand new, under construction, and finely finished.