Wes Aderhold (b. Texas) is a New York–based contemporary figurative artist working in painting and drawing. Largely self-taught, Aderhold built a studio practice that keeps process visible: earlier lines show through, features shift slightly out of register, backgrounds are cut with intention, and pale, screen-like overlays settle on the body like announcements. The result is a language that reads in public—contemporary figurative painting that concerns identity, performance, and how ordinary people are corrected to fit, from the suburb to the social feed.
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Aderhold paints the instant the act slips and a truer self comes through. In these contemporary figurative paintings, the image holds two truths at once—the person performed and the person present—so the viewer can feel the tension rather than be told what to think. The stage is familiar: the choreography of belonging that runs from the suburb to the feed, where roles are rehearsed, edited, and sometimes refused; the neighborhood’s quiet rules become the feed’s public verdicts. What matters here isn’t spectacle—it’s the rebuild: an image put back together without erasing how it changed. The result is a body of work that critics can argue with, curators can frame, and first-time viewers can feel immediately—because the claim lives in what the eye can see.
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Drawing on the tent poles of art history—Renaissance structure, Baroque chiaroscuro, modernist rigor—Aderhold works through a soft, reassembly-minded Cubism: not fracture for its own sake, but a fitting-back of parts until a living figure emerges. Prior lines breathe through paint. Charcoal and pastel remain as tension lines—puppet stringsthat register a quiet push–pull of power, so the figure can read as foreground or slide to background, depending on the viewer’s gaze. These are not portraits to admire so much as negotiations you can feel—images that keep their edits visible and invite the viewer to decide where the person stands next.
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