John Wesley: Love's Lust

John Wesley has been painting acutely sexual, intensely observed, narrative paintings for more than 40 years, yet has managed for most of that time to elude any adequate categorization. His flat, pastel “Hip-Pop” subject matter and subversive pictorial strategies never lacked for ardent fans. But the painting was perhaps too politically charged, too personal, or just too subtle to lend itself to the commercial appropriation that catapulted “capital P” Pop Art into the culture at large, and for many years Wesley remained a cult hero. The current search by young artists for new approaches to painting has made him a hero all over again. Wesley’s first American retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1, is evidence of renewed interest in his work.

John Wesley: Love’s Lust is staged against the backdrop of the P.S. 1 retrospective and is focused on Wesley’s pictorial strategies and process. The exhibition features an extensive group of his preparatory gouaches, several large paintings, and a selection of the intermediary collages and tracings Wesley makes before he begins to paint.

Organized by Linda Norden, Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Fogg Art Museum.