Wes Lang

Over the last several decades, artist Wes Lang has been honing his craft involving, amongst other things, a tireless, obsessive mining of a post-pop American landscape. A great many of the artist’s influences are a function of a distinct autobiographical experience with certain exceptions; the indigenous American as well as other totems of the American West, and painters and sculptors from middle of last century such as Twombly, Guston, Kline, Mitchell, Bacon dove-tailing on up to the more contemporary such as Basquiat, Kippenberger, and Mike Kelley. To date, Lang has made his mark primarily on canvas and paper -- though his practice extends to include cast bronze sculpture, collage, hotel stationary, fabric, glass and precious metals -- and is known for creating surfaces that sizzle; bombastic mélanges often brimming with elegantly rendered, still rough-around-the-edges imagery of grim reapers, Indian chiefs, fallen country music icons, sultry seductresses, long lost folk legends, dead authors, motorcycles, roses and other flora, birds, horses, all of which jockey for prominence within compositions sewn together (and resolved) by cryptic scrawls with a bittersweet vernacular resonate of Ram Dass and the Tao by way of the edge of the universe.