[NEWS] John Wesley, Painter of Pop-Inflected Paintings, Dies at 93


February 12, 2022



Todd Heisler/The New York Times



John Wesley, a painter of flat, cartoonlike, pop-inflected paintings, has died at 93. According to New York gallery Fredericks & Freiser that has represented his work for a long time, the artist died on Thursday. He was an elegant, kind, and funny man who will be greatly missed,” the gallery wrote in a statement posted to social media.

 

Wesley’s works seemed to penetrate American subconsciousness, and he was celebrated as a pop artist, a surrealist, and erotic. In a prolific career of more than 50 years, Mr. Wesley had the great distinction and occasional critical misfortune of eluding almost all attempts at categorization. He tolerated the label of Pop artist, he said, mostly because it got him into shows. Through the years, critics also described him variously as a “Surrealist secret agent,” a sly eroticist, a latter-day manifestation of Rococo, a renegade Color Field artist and a “Greek vase painter by way of Aubrey Beardsley.”

 



“Jack Frost” (1990). John Wesley Archives



In Wesley’s work, squirrels copulate and nude women duplicate and tumble through vacant spaces. Human bodies come to seem more like cut-out paper dolls that can easily manipulated, copied, and repositioned with ease. Many of his works have a dark atmosphere, but they often draw laughter in the combination of images. The pictures seem to imply a perverted form of kinky desire and even sometimes look like advertisements. But any warm eroticism latent in them is tempered by a more disturbing quality that is hard to pinpoint.

 

Mr. Wesley rarely gave interviews, but in one, with The New York Times in 2009, on the occasion of a retrospective organized by the Prada Foundation as part of the Venice Biennale, he said: “I didn’t go out and try to be a surrealist. It was just fun doing what I was doing.”




 

 

 

 

 


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