Lawrence and the Arabians from the Panoply portfolio: Inspired by the Splendours of the Great War

John Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California, on November 25, 1928. After holding a series of odd jobs, he 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. The spareness of his technique often seems more akin to the school known as Minimalism, however, and indeed his closest personal associations were with artists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, the latter of whom wrote a laudatory essay on Wesley’s early work and later set aside a space for him at his Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Wesley himself considers his work to be aligned with Surrealism and many of his paintings since the 1960s have taken this dimension yet further, while retaining an extremely limited range of colors and a sign-like flatness. Several retrospectives of his work have been held, the most recent at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2000 and Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2009.