Wade Guyton is a contemporary American artist known for his black monochrome inkjet printed paintings. Guyton’s work is formal in nature, and can be seen as a revisitation of Modernist ideals bracketed within the questions and issues of digital reproduction and the history of appropriation art practices. By treating the mechanical processes of the large-format printer as similar to darkroom printing or paint mixing, he is able to reinvigorate a classic methodology into a new medium. Born in 1972 in Hammond, IN, Guyton grew up in Lake City, TN and went on to attend the University of Tennessee and later Hunter College, where he received his MFA in 1998. In 2012, Guyton was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art—ironic, as he had been denied admission into the Whitney Independent Study Program twice. Today. Guyton’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

In this monumental digital print, Guyton references his 2007 work "WG1208". This “printed painting” of the 2000s consists of sheets of linen folded in half and fed through a large inkjet printer, where they were printed with the letter x as typed in Microsoft Word. The streaks, blurs, and smudges generated by the printer attest to Guyton’s imperfect control over the procedure; the artist embraced these accidents and irregularities as effects of chance. The present X Poster was produced by digitally stitching together photographs of the original and then printing the result at a matching scale. Another edition of this X Poster is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.