Dean Byington

{{Short description|American visual artist}} {{Infobox artist | name = Dean Byington |caption = |image = | birth_name = |birth_date = 1958 |birth_place = Santa Monica, California, US | death_date = | death_place = | nationality = | known_for = Painting, works on paper, collage | education = University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz | movement = | style = | spouse = | website = [http://www.deanbyington.com/ Dean Byington] | patrons = | awards = }} thumb|right|upright=1.3|Dean Byington, ''Theory of Machines (Grand Saturn)'', oil on linen, 57.5" x 65", 2017.

'''Dean Byington''' (born 1958), is a visual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.<ref name="Sheets06">Sheets, Hilarie M. "Critic's Pick: Dean Byington," ''ARTnews'', January 2006, p. 144</ref><ref name="Selz22">Selz, Gabrielle. [https://hyperallergic.com/785065/dean-byington-devastating-and-breathtaking-vision-of-climate-change/ "A Devastating and Breathtaking Vision of Climate Change,"] ''Hyperallergic'', December 21, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Dambrot17">Dambrot, Shana Nys. [https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/theory-machines-at-kohn-gallery/3685 "Dean Byington: Theory Of Machines at Kohn Gallery,"] ''WhiteHot Magazine'', June, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Rubin10">Rubin, David. [https://books.google.com/books?id=KnhWAAAAYAAJ&q=%27%27Psychedelic,%20Optical%20And%20Visionary%20Art%20Since%20The%201960s%27%27 ''Psychedelic, Optical And Visionary Art Since The 1960s''], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Cash08">Cash, Stephanie. "Dean Byington at Leslie Tonkonow," ''Art in America'', May 2008, p. 199–200.</ref><ref name="Davis17">Davis, Genie. [https://artandcakela.com/2017/06/16/dean-byingtons-the-theory-of-machines-at-kohn-gallery/ "Dean Byington's The Theory of Machines,"] ''Art and Cake'', June 16, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Smith05">Smith, Roberta. [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/arts/design/making-an-entrance-at-any-age.html?searchResultPosition=1 "Dean Byington,"] ''The New York Times'', May 6, 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Zellen17">Zellen, Jody. [https://artillerymag.com/kohn-gallery-dean-byington/ "Kohn Gallery: Dean Byington,"] ''Artillery'', June 7, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Roth22">Roth, David M. [https://www.squarecylinder.com/2022/12/cassandra-calling/ "Cassandra Calling,"] ''SquareCylinder'', December 1, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> 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."<ref name="Dambrot17"/>

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.<ref name="Moody15">Moody, Rick, Dean Byington and Griff Williams. [https://books.google.com/books?id=EL3hoQEACAAJ ''Dean Byington''], San Francisco: Gallery 16 Editions, 2015. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="WM">Whitney Museum of American Art. [https://whitney.org/artists/10089 Dean Byington], Artists. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="AIC">Art Institute of Chicago. [https://www.artic.edu/artists/102956/dean-byington Dean Byington], Artists. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="BAMPFA">Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. [https://collection.bampfa.berkeley.edu/catalog/e387a613-03c8-4623-a1b0 ''Untitled (Fungal Life)'', Dean Byington], Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> He has exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art,<ref name="Moody15"/> Nevada Museum of Art,<ref name="NMA">Nevada Museum of Art. [https://www.nevadaart.org/art/exhibitions/extraction/ "Extraction,"] Exhibitions, 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> San Antonio Museum of Art,<ref name="Rubin10"/> Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,<ref name="DVA15">Dalla Villa Adams, Amanda. [https://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/two-dimensional-exit/Content?oid=2162743 "Two-Dimensional Exit,"] ''Style Weekly'' (Richmond), January 6, 2015. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref> Frist Art Museum<ref name="Ayers09">Ayers, Will. "Byington Explores Underworld At The Frist," ''The Tennessean'', June 28, 2009.</ref> and Katzen Arts Center.<ref name="Katzen">Katzen Art Center. [https://www.american.edu/cas/museum/2015/byington-buildings-mig17.cfm "Dean Byington: Buildings without Shadows,"] American University, 2015. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref>

== 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.<ref name="Rubin10"/><ref name="Ayers09"/><ref name="Williams15">Williams, Griff. "Entropy Has No Opposite," in [https://books.google.com/books?id=EL3hoQEACAAJ ''Dean Byington''] by Dean Byington, Rick Moody and Griff Williams, San Francisco: Gallery 16 Editions, 2015. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Selz22"/><ref name="Rubin10"/><ref name="Ayers09"/><ref name="Williams15"/> 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.<ref name="Sheets06"/><ref name="Yau03b">Yau, John and Gallery Paule Anglim. [https://books.google.com/books?id=aiVQAQAAIAAJ ''Dean Byington''], San Francisco: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2003. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref>

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.<ref name="Raynor94">Raynor, Vivien. [https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/nyregion/art-in-hartford-bumptious-and-alive-and-on-the-cutting-edge.html "In Hartford, Bumptious and Alive and on the Cutting Edge,"] ''The New York Times'', November 20, 1994. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Ottmann07">Ottmann, Klaus. "A Conversation," in [https://books.google.com/books?id=Yhh8uAAACAAJ ''Dean Byington: Paintings and Works on Paper''], New York: and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, 2007. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Pascale06">Pascale, Mark. [https://fnewsmagazine.com/2006/05/curators-choice-dean-byington/ "Curator’s Choice: Dean Byington,”] ''F Newsmagazine'', The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, May 2006. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Yau03b"/><ref name="Raynor94"/>

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.<ref name="Baker03">Baker, Kenneth. [https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Welcome-to-Yerba-Buena-s-bargain-basement-of-2575522.php "Welcome to Yerba Buena's bargain basement of summer shows,"] ''San Francisco Chronicle'', July 31, 2003. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Sheets06"/> With this work, he began receiving increased attention, through solo exhibitions at Paule Anglim<ref name="Tarshis03">Tarshis, Jerome. "Dean Byington at Gallery Paule Anglim," ''Art in America'', December 2003.</ref><ref name="Baker03b">Baker, Kenneth. "Dean Byington at Galerie Paule Anglim," ''San Francisco Chronicle'', February 15, 2003.</ref> and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York;<ref name="Panero05">Panero, James. [https://newcriterion.com/issues/2005/6/gallery-chronicle-1075 "Gallery Chronicle,"] ''The New Criterion'', June 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Sheets06"/> he has continued to exhibit at both galleries.<ref name="Roth22"/><ref name="Indrisek10">Indrisek, Scott. "Uncharted Territory," ''Modern Painters'', November 2010.</ref> 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),<ref name="Moody15"/><ref name="Frist">Frist Art Museum. [https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition/dean-byington/ "Dean Byington: Terra Incognita,"] Exhibition, 2009. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Katzen"/><ref name="Haefele17">Haefele, Marc. [https://archive.kpcc.org/programs/offramp/2017/05/23/56955/review-dean-byington-ferocious-unruly-impulses-in/ "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.</ref> 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.<ref name="NMA"/><ref name="Fisher03">Fischer, Jack. "Conjuring Worlds From Bits and Pieces," ''San Jose Mercury'', May 27, 2003.</ref><ref name="Rubin10"/><ref name="AD08">''ArtDaily''. [https://artdaily.cc/news/24543/Future-Tense--Reshaping-the-Landscape-at-the-Neuberger-Museum-of-Art " Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape at the Neuberger Museum of Art,"] June 2, 2008. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Moody15"/>

== 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.<ref name="Ottmann07"/> He creates the paintings through a meticulous process merging digital and analog, and the handmade and mechanical.<ref name="Falkenberg08">Falkenberg, Merrill. [https://www.frieze.com/article/dean-byington "Dean Byington,"] ''Frieze'', April 1, 2008. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Smith05b">Smith, Roberta. [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/arts/movies/the-listings-june-17-june-23.html?searchResultPosition=2 "Art Listings: Dean Byington,"] ''The New York Times'', June 17, 2005. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Zellen17"/> 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.<ref name="Selz22"/><ref name="Sheets06"/><ref name="Rubin10"/><ref name="VMFA">Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. [https://vmfa.museum/piction/6027262-7988930/ ''Two Harbors'', Dean Byington], Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> 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.<ref name="Yau03">Yau, John. "Invitation to the Labyrinth," ''Dean Byington'', San Francisco: Gallery Paule Anglim, 2003.</ref><ref name="Selz22"/> 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.<ref name="Cash08"/><ref name="Williams15"/><ref name="Roth22"/><ref name="Selz22"/>

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.<ref name="Falkenberg08"/><ref name="Jux17">''Juxtapoz''. [https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/dean-byington-s-theory-of-machines/ "Dean Byington's Theory of Machines,"] April 12, 2017. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref><ref name="Indrisek10"/><ref name="Dambrot17"/> 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.<ref name="Yau03"/><ref name="Pascale06"/> 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."<ref name="Williams15"/>

=== Paintings, 2003–2010 === thumb|right|upright=1.35|Dean Byington, ''Underground #1'' (detail), oil on linen, 46" x 42", 2006. 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).<ref name="Tarshis03"/><ref name="Smith05"/><ref name="Falkenberg08"/> 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;<ref name="TNY">''The New Yorker''. [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/11/26/art-42 "Dean Byington,"] November 26, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref><ref name="Falkenberg08"/> 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.<ref name="Smith05"/><ref name="Tarshis03"/><ref name="TNY"/> 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.<ref name="Tarshis03"/><ref name="Sheets06"/><ref name="Smith05"/> 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."<ref name="Yau03"/>

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);<ref name="Cash08"/><ref name="Falkenberg08"/><ref name="Indrisek10"/> ''The New Yorker'' described them as "glazed in candy-colored pink, green, or robin’s-egg blue, like Easter eggs—or blotter acid."<ref name="TNY"/> This work included the green "Underground" series, which featured with geologic forms: stalactites, stalagmites, minerals, gems, and cave-like openings into various spaces.<ref name="Ottmann07"/>

=== Paintings, 2011–present === Writers suggest that Byington's later paintings explore historical and sociopolitical themes in a more expansive, cinematic manner in terms of vastness (their large scale and God's-eye views), sweeping subjects (climate change, terrorism, urban sprawl) and time (a sense of layer centuries of history including the potential future).<ref name="Davis17"/><ref name="Selz22"/><ref name="21C">21c Museum Hotels. [https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/museum/exhibit/highlights-from-the-collection-2012/ "Convergence: Highlights from the Collection 2012,"] Exhibit, 2012. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> These paintings blur notions of urban and rural, ancient and modern, piling intractable ambiguities and compressed, distressed and fragmentary realities into monumental landscapes, geologic formations and industrial sites suggestive of post-human or post-apocalyptic, possibly alternate civilizations (''Omphalos'', 2011).<ref name="Williams15"/><ref name="Haefele17"/><ref name="Roth22"/><ref name="SqC22">''SquareCylinder''. [https://www.squarecylinder.com/2022/12/best-of-2022/ "Best of 2022,"] December 14, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> ''SquareCylinder'' described the maze of cellblock-like huts, scaffolding and brickwork in the black-and-white landscape ''Divided City'' (2015) as "an unending public works project … depict[ing] a mismanaged future, an allegory of Big Plans and half-starved dreams."<ref name="Couzens18">Couzens, Julia. [https://www.squarecylinder.com/2018/08/unconscious-rationale-anglim-gilbert/ "Unconscious Rationale @ Anglim Gilbert,"] ''SquareCylinder'', August 6, 2022. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref>

In his exhibition, "The Theory of Machines" (Kohn Gallery, 2017), Byington presented nine large paintings of desolate, built scenes whose commonalities included skeletal and flayed structures, baroque facades, the great concentric holes of open pit mines and abandoned machines sprawled in ruin (e.g., ''Theory of Machines (Grand Saturn)'', 2017).<ref name="Haefele17"/><ref name="Zellen17"/><ref name="Jux17"/> ''Bingham Canyon Mine'' (2017) offered a striated mining-ravaged landscape inspired by photographs of the two largest mines in the world (the title mine, in Utah and the Grasberg mine in Indonesia), "rebuilt into a futuristic city—part Piranesi, part Escher—of interconnected bridges, towers and scaffold-encased structures."<ref name="Zellen17"/><ref name="Selz22"/>

thumb|right|upright=1.35|Dean Byington, ''Oceans (Dream Painting #5)'', oil on linen, 67" x 82", 2022. Byington's show "Cassandra: Truth and Madness" (Anglim/Trimble, 2022)—its title a reference to the Robinson Jeffers poem, ''Cassandra''—offered a wider range of work depicting the world as a facade teetering on the brink of collapse in the wake of human activity.<ref name="Roth22"/><ref name="Selz22"/> The "Colossus" series (2022) depicted movie sets built on giant scaffolds towering over vast, carved out tracts of land.<ref name="Roth22"/> Draped in front of the vast sites were curtain-like pastoral scenes resembling the romantic paintings of artists such as Frederic Church.<ref name="Selz22"/> The effect was a layering of two human constructs—idealized landscapes embodying Manifest Destiny that obscured the dark side of American expansionism, placed band-aid-like over the giant open pits of mines—a metaphor for the veiling of devastation that political narratives enact.<ref name="Selz22"/> In other paintings, dystopias invaded cinematic interiors; ''Oceans'' (2022) depicted a rising tide with a gliding shark swamping an opulent, Victorian bedroom.<ref name="Selz22"/> ''Hyperallergic'''s Gabrielle Selz wrote of the show, "Drawing on the blast sites of the Nevada desert and abandoned scenery of movies like ''Citizen Kane'', Byington’s visual language mingles romance and theatricality with the disastrous consequences of climate change and environmental contamination."<ref name="Selz22"/>

== Public collections == Byington's work belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago,<ref name="AIC"/> Berkeley Art Museum,<ref name="BAMPFA"/> Chazen Museum of Art,<ref name="CMA">Chazen Museum of Art. [https://chazen.wisc.edu/collection/28735/the-bees-and-the-ants-1/ ''The Bees and the Ants, #1'', Dean Byington], Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> Cleveland Clinic,<ref name="CCC">The Cleveland Clinic. ''Power of Art: Cleveland Clinic Collection'', Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Clinic, 2017, p. 82.</ref> di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art,<ref name="dR">di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art. [https://www.dirosaart.org/di-rosa-artist-list/ Artist List]. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> Fisher Landau Center for Art,<ref name="NYAB">''New York Art Beat''. [http://www.nyartbeat.com/event/2011/43DE "Unforgettable: Selections from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection,"] Exhibition, 2011. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref> Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center,<ref name="Loeb">Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. [https://emuseum.vassar.edu/objects/15603/the-bees-and-the-ants-2?ctx=f573aed90477f70f2b5856d5130afefec1cc9107&idx=0 ''The Bees and the Ants, #2'', Dean Byington], Objects. Retrieved September 7, 2023.</ref> Indianapolis Museum of Art,<ref name="IMA">Indianapolis Museum of Art. [https://collection.imamuseum.org/artwork/44097/ ''Blue Landscape (Jewels)'', Dean Byington], Collection. Retrieved September 6, 2023.</ref> Los Angeles County Museum of Art,<ref name="Moody15"/> Nevada Museum of Art,<ref name="NMA"/> San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 21c Museum Hotels,<ref name="21C"/> Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,<ref name="VMFA"/> and Whitney Museum of Art,<ref name="WM"/> among others.

==References== {{Reflist}}

==External links== *[http://www.deanbyington.com/ Dean Byington] official website *[https://www.anglimtrimble.com/artists/dean-byington Dean Byington], Anglim/Trimble *[https://www.tonkonow.com/byington.html Dean Byington], Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Byington, Dean}} Category:21st-century American artists Category:American contemporary painters Category:American environmental artists Category:American collage artists Category:Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:University of California, Santa Cruz alumni Category:1958 births Category:Living people