John Wesley (1928 – 2022) made works often described as Pop but he also drew from Minimalism and Surrealism. Following a stint in art school, which he attended at night while working various odd jobs, Wesley became an illustrator for Northrop Aircraft and began painting at the age of 22. His first exhibition consisted mostly of large-format acrylic paintings of imaginary seals and stamps; he would retain the flatness and limited color range of these works, but would move into the depiction of bodies and cartoon characters, the latter of which led him to be grouped with Pop Art as the 1960s progressed. He became known for paintings that placed popular, clean-cut comic-strip characters in decidedly unwholesome situations.
Wesley’s work was less defined by an interest in consumerism than by a “penchant for erotic narrative,” as critic Dave Hickey, reviewing the artist’s 2000 retrospective at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now known as MoMA PS1) noted in Artforum. “The most interesting thing about Wesley's shrewd appropriation of Rococo idioms,” he wrote, “is less the fact that they are there than the fact that we don't notice them, or, if we do, we don't remark on them. Part of this inattention may be attributed to Wesley's disarming levity. . .”
Wesley exhibited widely, enjoying solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada, Venice; the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Germany; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. His work was shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972 and is held in the collections of the Stedelijk and of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions.
He was married to the American author and MacDowell Fellow Hannah Green (15x 59-82).
