Wesley, who died in 2022 at age 93, is known for his flattened, idiosyncratic figurations that defy easy classificationwithin any single artistic movement. Drawing inspiration from images in comics and other mass media, the artistcultivated a distinctive, graphic style characterized by bold, weighted lines, unmodulated color, and an absurdist-edge.

Marked by eroticism, wry humor, and often a slight sense of unease, Wesley’s work explores a wide range of imageryinformed by pop cultural and literary sources as well as the artist’s own memories and daily experiences. Many of hisworks are concerned with enactments of balance and symmetry, examining nuances of sexuality and desire through aformal language characterized by unexpected crispness and precision.

“The puzzling, open-ended ambiguity of Wesley’s depictions encourages expansive gestures of critique, whatevertheir ultimate merits,” art historian Richard Shiff writes in a newly commissioned essay for Pace Publishing’s digitalcatalogue accompanying the gallery’s Wesley exhibition. “To a theorist, his art readily demonstrates thatinterpretation has no limits, for every nuance of graphic difference initiates multiple interpretive threads with thepotential to lead just about anywhere.”

Wesley produced a large body of landscapes regularly depicting tranquil shorelines and stormy seascapes, but alsorolling hills and urban skylines. In his figurations, the human body and its constituent parts are often used toexperiment with repetition as a formal device. Wesley also frequently reimagined characters from popular culture—most notably Dagwood Bumstead and his wife Blondie from the Blondie comic strip—in scenes across his body ofwork.

“His often caustic wit also has a warm-heartedness to it when the topic demands, and his sense of comedy is no less pronounced than his sense of tragedy,” art historian Martin Hentschel wrote in his 2005 publication on Wesley’s works on paper, continuing later, “He directed his gaze above all to the human condition, with all its peaks, ambiguities, and abysses.”

Pace’s upcoming exhibition will showcase the varied scales of Wesley’s works on paper, allowing visitors toexperience the impressive range of form and imagery through which he experimented with repeating, layering, andmirroring—formal mainstays of his paintings. Though the works on view in the show span Wesley’s career, theyreveal a remarkable consistency in his approach to image-making over the course of five decades. Tracing theevolution of the artist’s interests over time, these artworks shed light on the different subjects that entered his visuallexicon between the 1960s and 2000s.

The show will take a broad view of Wesley’s life and career, spotlighting several objects by the artist—including acanvas vest and a selection of paper neckties—in addition to his works on paper. These rarely exhibited and, in somecases, never-before-exhibited pieces feature patterns and motifs that are often mirrored in the artist’s works onpaper and paintings, reflecting his ability to translate his signature style across mediums and dimensions.

A unique voice in the canon of Contemporary art, John Wesley (b. 1928, Los Angeles, California; d. 2022, New York)is known for his precise, lyrical, and often deadpan painterly investigations of the American subconscious. With noformal artistic training, two of Wesley’s jobs had a direct impact on his early practice. At the age of 24, he beganworking as an illustrator in the Production Engineering Department at Northrop Aircraft in Los Angeles where hetranslated blueprints into drawings. In 1960, he moved to New York, where he worked as a postal clerk, utilizingsymbols such as the shield-like postage stamp and his employee badge in his paintings. Later, his practiceexpanded to incorporate varied and enigmatic iconographies such as animals, beguiling women, and portraiture ofsubjects including Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, and Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, the president of the1932 International Olympic Committee. Through a carefully refined visual vocabulary of clean lines, solid shapes, andrepetition, Wesley imbued everyday scenes and quotidian subjects with humor and wry wit. Exploring themesrelating to trauma, eroticism, innocence, and coyness, paintings within his oeuvre are characterized by a linearstylized formation, similar to comic strips, and are often populated with cartoon characters such as DagwoodBumstead, Popeye, and Olive Oyl. His series, Searching for Bumstead, which he began in 1974 and continued for theentirety of his career, depicts empty interiors—including a vacant armchair, slippers by a bedside, a bathtub filledwith water—and is an exploration of the trauma of losing his father, whose sudden death deeply affected him.

Wesley defies categorization as an artist. During the 1960s, as the tenets of Pop art began to take shape, he wasgrouped with the movement due to the basic elements of his style and subject matter. Wesley exhibited alongsidePop artists such as Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselman, and Roy Lichtenstein but ultimately eluded true categorizationboth in theory and in practice due to his unique visual language. His first solo exhibition was at the Robert ElkonGallery, New York, in 1963. Minimalist artist Donald Judd, a lifelong supporter of the artist, reviewed the paintings inthe show: “the forms selected and shapes to which they are unobtrusively altered, the order used, and the smalldetails are humorous and goofy. This becomes a cool, psychological oddness.” [1] Wesley was given his own room atthe Documenta 5 Retrospective at Kassel (1972) and by the mid 70s it became clear that his work lay somewherebetween Pop, Surrealism, and Minimalism, though no label ever encapsulated his singular style. Wesley’scontributions to painting are undeniable. Envisioned by Donald Judd, the largest collection of works by Wesley,spanning from 1963 to the present, are permanently on view in his eponymous gallery at the Chinati Foundation,Marfa, Texas. His work is held in public collections worldwide including the Hirshhorn Museum and SculptureGarden, Washington D.C.; Kunstmuseum, Basel; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Speed Art Museum,Louisville, Kentucky; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.