John Wesley at de Sarthe Gallery
By Ashley Lee
Hong Kong’s De Sarthe Gallery is hosting American artist John Wesley’s first solo show in Hong Kong, “Paintings: 1960s – 2000s,” which will run until November 12. Wesley is well known for his ability to defy categorization: his paintings have been considered within the Pop Art or Minimalism movements, but sometimes feature surrealist elements.
Wesley’s works start from commercial images; he begins by tracing over images from magazines, catalogs and advertisements. These tracings are then manipulated—repeated, resized, re-colored, and disparately combined—onto a large canvas. He favors using flat planes of pastel colors, usually pinks and blues, contained by elegant black lines, imbuing his paintings with a graphic quality.
