Beyer Projects is pleased to announce Islamic, a painted bronze edition by John Wesley. The project, an edition of 6, is based on a 1964 work entitled Islamic that has since been destroyed. Wesley’s paintings, as many scholars have noted, employ styles associated with the Pop and Surrealist movements and yet defy categorization as either. His works are deceptively simple: an economy of line, an insistently flat, often distant execution with an interest in repetition, and a restricted palette are defining features. And yet this apparent simplicity belies the presence of an extraordinary eye for composition, a measured gesture in which no line is extraneous, and a perceptive, curious, and unabashedly erotic mind for which the unknown and the imaginary are powerful provocations.
The nudes in Wesley’s works are drawn from existing media; his method involves tracing those found forms and then grafting them onto the canvas or object and enlarging them exponentially via a mathematical formula.