Bill Saylor

Bill Saylor showed work at an open studio in the Ice Plant in May 2010. An idea of Saylor’s work might be gleaned from the title of his 2005 show at the Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco: Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies. The New York-based artist makes paintings in which different traditions of art are blended and mashed. He draws not only on abstract art but on graffiti, ads, cartoons, logos, doodling, etc. In a Saylor painting, swathes and blobs of Ab-Ex-like impasto jostle for space with monsters, skeletons, leering ectoplasmic shapes, and other types of visuals seen on construction-site fencing and the sides of vintage hot rods. Saylor uses a diverse array of techniques (e.g., stencil, spraying, drawing, brush) to build up his canvases, so that no single “style”—or type of imagery—predominates. The paintings that result are raucous and polyglot.

Bill Saylor has been showing his work since the early 1990s in gallery and museum exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Miami, Frankfurt, Las Vegas, Copenhagen, Athens, Los Angeles, and other cities. He has had several solo shows at Leo Koenig Inc. in New York. Saylor lives in Brooklyn.