Set of 3 exhibition postcards. Serpentine Galleries, London, 2017. Offset-printed on card stock, colour recto with printed artwork details verso.
Original set of three Wade Guyton postcards issued for his 2017 exhibition at Serpentine Galleries. Each card reproduces a work in Guyton’s characteristic inkjet-on-linen mode, with clean institutional design and full artwork details printed on the reverse. As a small group, they make a sharp piece of contemporary exhibition ephemera — compact documents of a practice deeply invested in the instability between painting, printing, digital imaging, and circulation.
What gives this set extra resonance is the 2009 interview exchange in which David Armstrong asks Guyton what he thinks when he sees postcards of his work in museums, only for Guyton to reply that he has never seen one. Read alongside that moment, these cards feel more than promotional matter. They sit right inside the logic of his work, where the artwork is never fully sealed off from its own reproduction, mediation, or afterlife as image.
Guyton’s work emerged at a point when painting could no longer ignore the screen, the printer, or the conditions of digital reproduction. His use of misfeeds, drag marks, compression, and mechanical error turned the inkjet process into both tool and subject. These postcards echo that tension exactly: secondary objects, but uncannily close to the questions the work itself asks about surface, authorship, and circulation.
