Bill Saylor - ORION, Snow Painting, 2024

The painting comes at you like a signal interrupted. Against a ground of black and deep blue, an owl-faced creature emerges from the field — green-skinned, round-eyed, orange-eared, alert — caught in the middle of a network of white, red, and orange marks that slash and loop and drip across the surface with total conviction. Collage elements punctuate the composition: in the upper left, a runic or totemic symbol traced in white on blue — two eyes and a spine of marks — and in the lower right, a rectangular field of blue with an urn or chalice, equally diagrammatic, equally charged with private meaning. Between them, orange pastels rake across the lower half of the canvas like crossed lightning. Everything is happening at once, and none of it cancels any of it out.Orion belongs to the Snow Paintings series, which Saylor showed at Magenta Plains, New York, in 2024. The title carries a double valence: Orion is the constellation, a hunter in the night sky, a pattern of light read from ancient darkness — and the work is itself a kind of constellation, marks distributed across the canvas in a logic that is not random but not diagrammatic either. You feel the system without being able to describe it. The creature at the centre — green, catlike, owl-like, wholly invented — is one of Saylor’s recurring hybrid beings: animals that carry symbolic or mythological weight without resolving into any single tradition, totems that feel simultaneously prehistoric and contemporary, as if they were scratched on a cave wall by someone who had also studied Basquiat.The marks themselves are the argument. Saylor works in layers of oil, collage, and drawing media, building the surface through a process that is simultaneously explosive and controlled — what the critic Janet Goleas once described as “a furious scrawl that ricochets from side to side like visual warfare,” compositions that feel “pulled from the subconscious with a veracity that would make Carl Jung proud.” But Saylor’s unconscious is also highly informed: the gestural marks carry the weight of German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism — Beuys, Baselitz, Schnabel — while the iconography recycles graffiti, cave painting, natural history illustration, and meteorological maps. The result is neither pure abstraction nor illustration but something genuinely hybrid: a painting that thinks through its symbols at the same speed that it lays them down.The specific decision to work at this scale — 40 by 52 inches, intimate relative to many of Saylor’s large-format works — concentrates the energy rather than dissipating it. The creature and the symbols and the marks all press against each other within a tighter field, creating a compression that larger canvases distribute across more space. The collaged elements, applied directly to the painted surface, introduce a material break in the picture plane: you are reminded that the painting is a physical object built from layers, that its depth is literal before it is illusionistic. This is a painting about its own construction as much as about the creature it depicts.

ORION IN THE CONTEXT OF SAYLOR’S PRACTICE AND THE SNOW PAINTINGS SERIES
Bill Saylor (b. 1960, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has been a central and stubbornly independent figure in the New York painting scene since the 1990s. His practice emerged from the Brooklyn milieu of that decade — a scene characterised by its resistance to institutional positioning, its commitment to painting as an act rather than a product, and its cross-contamination between fine art, graffiti, zine culture, and underground music. Saylor has remained in that spirit across more than three decades: viscerally committed to the medium, formally inventive, and essentially uncategorisable. His work has appeared in Frieze magazine, been reviewed in the New York Times on multiple occasions, and attracted the sustained attention of peers including Josh Smith, Joe Bradley, Katherine Bernhardt, and Harmony Korine, with whom he collaborated on the zine Ho Bags in 2010.The Snow Paintings series marks a significant moment in Saylor’s recent output. Shown at Magenta Plains in 2024, the works bring an unusual medium into contact with his signature gestural vocabulary: plastisol — the flexible, slightly raised polymer typically associated with screen-printed T-shirts and industrial graphic production — applied to canvas alongside oil. The material is simultaneously familiar and strange, decorative and structural, low-culture and technically demanding. In Saylor’s hands it becomes another layer in the archaeological accumulation of the surface, adding tactility and a slight sheen that catches light differently from the oil around it. The series represents exactly the kind of material restlessness that has defined his practice: never settling into a fixed method, always finding new ways for the physical substance of painting to carry meaning.The exhibition also coincided with a period of renewed critical and institutional attention to Saylor’s work, including its presentation at the Piermarq gallery in Sydney (2025), curated by the painter Jordy Kerwick — himself an artist who has spoken of Saylor’s importance as a reference point. This international reach, decades into a career rooted in Brooklyn’s alternative spaces, reflects the genuine breadth of Saylor’s influence across generational and geographical lines.

THE CASE FOR ACQUIRING ORION FOR THE BLACK SQUARE COLLECTION
There is a category of artist that is more important to the history of painting than to the history of the art market, and whose work, precisely because of that gap, represents an exceptional acquisition opportunity. Bill Saylor is the defining example of that category in contemporary American art. He has been making work of the highest formal intelligence for over thirty years, has been consistently recognised by the most respected practitioners and critics of his generation, and has done so on his own terms, outside the machinery of commercial hype.The peer network around Saylor is itself a market signal of unusual quality. He has shown in two-person exhibitions with Josh Smith, who is now represented by David Zwirner and regularly achieves six-figure auction results. He was included in a group show curated by Joe Bradley, one of the most respected painters of his generation. He has shown at Frieze New York in a booth curated by Katherine Bernhardt. He was included in Animal Farm at the Brant Foundation — one of the most prestigious private collection exhibition contexts in the United States. His work was included in Contemporary Painting curated by Alex Katz at the Colby College Museum of Art in 2004. Jerry Saltz selected him as a winner of the New American Paintings Northeastern Competition in 2020 — a meaningful curatorial act from the most widely-read critic in American art. He was an artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. He has been profiled in Frieze, W MagazineJuxtapoz, and reviewed repeatedly in the New York Times. His 2019 monograph, published by Magenta Plains with an introduction by Carlo McCormick, is the object-level evidence of a practice taken seriously at every level.His influence on younger painters is documented and concrete. Robert Nava — now represented by Pace Gallery and one of the most commercially significant figurative painters of his generation, with auction results well into six figures — works within a language of raw, hybrid-creature figuration and gestural mark-making that clearly descends from the territory Saylor has occupied for decades. Nava has spoken openly about the Brooklyn painting scene and its anti-institutional energy as the formative context for his practice. Saylor is among the artists who established the terms of that conversation. The same is true, more broadly, of a generation of painters now commanding serious market attention — artists who combine raw gesture with personal iconography, who treat the picture plane as a site of archaeological layering, who resist the clean finish of market-optimised painting — all of whom are working in a space that Saylor helped to define.Orion is a resolved, compact, and formally ambitious work from a series made at a moment of renewed institutional attention. It combines the full range of Saylor’s powers — the totemic creature, the layered collage, the slash of pastel across oil, the embedded symbol — within a scale that makes it immediately liveable with. For Black Square, it is the kind of acquisition that deepens a collection’s historical intelligence: a work by the painter who made the language that the painters the market is currently celebrating learned to speak.

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McCormick, Carlo. Introduction. Bill Saylor. Magenta Plains, New York, 2019.“Winners: Northeastern Competition 2019. Selections by Jerry Saltz.” New American Paintings, issue 146, February/March 2020.Goleas, Janet. “Art Review: Ubiquity and Omnipresence at Ille Arts.” Hamptons Art Hub, 23 April 2015.“4 artists comment on Bill Saylor’s primordial, uncanny allure.” Document, October 2019.Johnson, Ken. “Art Review.” The New York Times, 4 July 2003.Cotter, Holland. “Peanut Gallery, The Journal Gallery.” The New York Times, 30 January 2009.Raskin, Lisi. “Bill Saylor.” Frieze, November–December 2003, p. 97.