Dean Byington (born 1958), is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.Sheets, Hilarie M. "Critic's Pick: Dean Byington," ARTnews, January 2006, p. 144Selz, Gabrielle. "A Devastating and Breathtaking Vision of Climate Change," Hyperallergic, December 21, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023. He is known for large, hyper-detailed mixed-media paintings and paper collages of labyrinthine landscapes and invented universes that serve as settings for enigmatic allegories on nature, culture, time and humanity's effect on the planet.Dambrot, Shana Nys. "Dean Byington: Theory Of Machines at Kohn Gallery," WhiteHot Magazine, June, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Rubin, David. Psychedelic, Optical And Visionary Art Since The 1960s, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Cash, Stephanie. "Dean Byington at Leslie Tonkonow," Art in America, May 2008, p. 199–200.Davis, Genie. "Dean Byington's The Theory of Machines," Art and Cake, June 16, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023. Seamless amalgams of images reworked from diverse sources, including his own stylized drawings, his art evokes fairy tales gone awry, the precision of centuries-old etchings and cartographic detail, and utopian and dystopian science-fiction.Smith, Roberta. "Dean Byington," The New York Times, May 6, 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Zellen, Jody. "Kohn Gallery: Dean Byington," Artillery, June 7, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Roth, David M. "Cassandra Calling," SquareCylinder, December 1, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023. In 2017, critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote, "achieving a profound, operatic feat of scale, density, and clarity … Byington’s surrealism is that of dreams and memories, with an internal logic that unifies Eastern and Western antiquity, the consequences of climate change, the engineering of urban sprawl, and the limited role of culture in making sense of the soul- and soil-crushing weight of all that civilization."
Byington's work belongs to the public art collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago and Berkeley Art Museum, among others.Moody, Rick, Dean Byington and Griff Williams. Dean Byington, San Francisco: Gallery 16 Editions, 2015. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Whitney Museum of American Art. Dean Byington, Artists. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Art Institute of Chicago. Dean Byington, Artists. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Untitled (Fungal Life), Dean Byington, Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023. He has exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art,Nevada Museum of Art. "Extraction," Exhibitions, 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2023. San Antonio Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,Dalla Villa Adams, Amanda. "Two-Dimensional Exit," Style Weekly (Richmond), January 6, 2015. Retrieved September 7, 2023. Frist Art MuseumAyers, Will. "Byington Explores Underworld At The Frist," The Tennessean, June 28, 2009. and Katzen Arts Center.Katzen Art Center. "Dean Byington: Buildings without Shadows," American University, 2015. Retrieved September 7, 2023.
Early life and career Byington was born in 1958 in Santa Monica, California. His parents participated in the Manhattan Project. His father, an engineer, worked at Los Alamos and on the instrumentation at the Nevada test sites; his mother was a geologist and served as one of Robert Oppenheimer's secretaries.Williams, Griff. "Entropy Has No Opposite," in Dean Byington by Dean Byington, Rick Moody and Griff Williams, San Francisco: Gallery 16 Editions, 2015. Retrieved September 6, 2023. Byington grew up in Culver City, California, exploring the full-scale outdoor sets of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Desilu Studios as an adolescent; the influence of that experience and his parents' history is discernible in various cinematic, geological and apocalyptic aspects of his art. In 1980, he received a BA and certificate of art from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He earned an MA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987 and 1988.Yau, John and Gallery Paule Anglim. Dean Byington, San Francisco: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2003. Retrieved September 6, 2023.
Byington's early works were large photographic assemblages composed by projecting old daguerreotypes (of military technologies, UFOs and historical events among other subjects) piecemeal onto canvas and acetate painted with photo emulsion.Raynor, Vivien. "In Hartford, Bumptious and Alive and on the Cutting Edge," The New York Times, November 20, 1994. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Ottmann, Klaus. "A Conversation," in Dean Byington: Paintings and Works on Paper, New York: and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 2007. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Pascale, Mark. "Curator’s Choice: Dean Byington,” F Newsmagazine, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, May 2006. Retrieved September 7, 2023. During this period, he appeared in group shows at the Crocker Art Museum, Real Art Ways and Nasher Museum of Art, among others, and solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim (now Anglim/Trimble) in San Francisco.
By the early-2000s, he had shifted from photochemical methods to a labor-intensive process involving collage, silkscreening and hand-painting that first involved teaching himself to draw in the stylized manner of nineteenth-century wood engraving.Baker, Kenneth. "Welcome to Yerba Buena's bargain basement of summer shows," San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2003. Retrieved September 6, 2023. With this work, he began receiving increased attention, through solo exhibitions at Paule AnglimTarshis, Jerome. "Dean Byington at Gallery Paule Anglim," Art in America, December 2003.Baker, Kenneth. "Dean Byington at Galerie Paule Anglim," San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 2003. and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York;Panero, James. "Gallery Chronicle," The New Criterion, June 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023. he has continued to exhibit at both galleries.Indrisek, Scott. "Uncharted Territory," Modern Painters, November 2010. In the 2000s, he has also had solo exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, Frist Art Museum, Katzen Arts Center and Kohn Gallery (Los Angeles),Frist Art Museum. "Dean Byington: Terra Incognita," Exhibition, 2009. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Haefele, Marc. "Dean Byington's ferocious, unruly impulses in a new show at Kohn Gallery," Off-Ramp, KPCC Public Radio, May 23, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023. and appeared in surveys at the Nevada Museum of Art, de Saisset Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art and Neuberger Museum of Art, among others.Fischer, Jack. "Conjuring Worlds From Bits and Pieces," San Jose Mercury, May 27, 2003.ArtDaily. " Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape at the Neuberger Museum of Art," June 2, 2008. Retrieved September 7, 2023. A monograph of his work, Dean Byington, was published in 2015 and includes an original short story and poem by Rick Moody and essay by Griff Williams.
Work and reception Byington's work mainly consists of large canvases fusing screened oil on linen and hand-painting as well as small, detailed works on paper composed of tiny, hand-cut photocopies from old illustrated books and his own drawings. He creates the paintings through a meticulous process merging digital and analog, and the handmade and mechanical.Falkenberg, Merrill. "Dean Byington," Frieze, April 1, 2008. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Smith, Roberta. "Art Listings: Dean Byington," The New York Times, June 17, 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023. He photocopies and collages imagery—his drawings, Victorian-era illustrations, historical images—then works into them to achieve coherence, before scanning and silkscreening the work onto canvas (sometimes in multiple prints) and, finally, connecting interstices by hand-painting details and (occasional) washes of color.Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Two Harbors, Dean Byington, Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023. The canvases function like enclosures, Immersing viewers viscerally in all-over compositions that counterpoint the "antique" quality of the imagery with contemporary painting strategies involving frontality, flatness, layering and instantaneity.Yau, John. "Invitation to the Labyrinth," Dean Byington, San Francisco: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2003. The work's packed, sometimes-obscured imagery and unexpected juxtapositions—conflicting pictorial and architectural logics, natural and human-made environments devoid of people, animals engaged in human behaviors—generate ambiguous narratives that can range from fanciful, even romantic to eerie to Cassandra-like in their forebodings of apocalypse.
Critics have connected Byington's art to the intricate works of diverse artists including Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, M. C. Escher and filmmaker Terry Gilliam, the surrealist collages of Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters, and the mid-20th century Bay Area assemblage and psychedelic aesthetic.Juxtapoz. "Dean Byington's Theory of Machines," April 12, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023. In a 2003 essay, John Yau related Byington's use of silkscreening to earlier practitioners such as Rauschenberg and Warhol, but distinguished him—from them and from appropriation artists—by his emphasis on excavating pre-photographic sources rather than recontextualizing contemporary mass-media images. In 2017, Griff Williams remarked, "the disjointed labyrinthine structures of Byington's work may be fueled by the legacy of dark scientific experiments or the artifice of Hollywood's past, but they also share sympathy with the Wunderkammer" (or German "cabinets of curiosities"), which "celebrated the intersections between science and superstition, the natural and artificial."
Paintings, 2003–2010
In the 2000s, Byington largely focused on black and white paintings filled edge to edge with detailed renderings of flora, fauna and dilapidated, ramshackle structures, some of them punctuated by washes of jewel-like color (e.g., King and Queen, 2002). These overgrown scenes were dizzying in their density and perceptually challenging, with flattened spaces lacking traditional entry points or clear distinctions between fore-, middle- and background;The New Yorker. "Dean Byington," November 26, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2023. noting the images' weaving of old and new visual modes, critics simultaneously compared their pattern-like motifs to ornate wallpaper, Chinese scrolls and modernist painting. The seemingly benign scenes were populated with whimsical, anthropomorphic animals, which upon close inspection, were embroiled in sometimes-savage conflicts that suggested crises and devastations, past and present. John Yau wrote of such works, "Despite their allusions to the Victorian and Symbolist eras, as well as to children's books, Byington's paintings are hardly nostalgic. In fact, these paintings strike me as both visionary and emotionally attuned to the sense of impending disaster that marks our historical moment."
As the decade progressed, Byington pushed the horror vacui sense of density in the work and also began creating color canvasses that suggested mysterious minimalist monochromes in which his signature imagery appeared as if seen through an aquarium or fog (e.g. Underground #1, 2006; Waterfalls 2010); The New Yorker described them as "glazed in candy-colored pink, green, or robin’s-egg blue, like Easter eggs—or blotter acid." This work included the green "Underground" series, which featured with geologic forms: stalactites, stalagmites, minerals, gems, and cave-like openings into various spaces.
Paintings, 2011–present