WES LANG AND BAIT MEN EAGLES FILL THE SKY TEE (WHITE)

WES LANGOver the last several decades, artist Wes Lang has been honing his craft and mining the iconography of a post-pop Americana. Lang is an individualist whose heroes—fallen country music icons, jazz musicians, Native American Chiefs—are renegades that have carved their own paths despite adversity. In the Wes Lang universe, recurring figures and symbols— horses, reapers, skulls, birds, the indigenous American, and other totems of the American West— serve as emblems in one way or another for freedom. His frenetic and sometimes manic paintings nod to carefully studied painters such as Twombly, Guston, Basquiat, and Kline. The American West weighs heavy in Lang’s mind, a symbol of the American Dream where ‘going West’ represents the chance to reinvent oneself. Notions of reinvention and awakening resonate deeply with Lang, as frequent references to the Tao Te Ching and the lectures of Ram Dass are scattered throughout the work, revealing a central ethos that underlies the artist’s com