Nathan Hylden AMERICAN, b. 1978

Nathan Hylden creates paintings using rigorous conceptual processes that investigate the philosophical relationships between cause and effect, absence and presence, and emptiness and meaning. For a 2010 series, he devised a strict technical process and used it to create nine paintings: he painted his canvases a holographic gold, then stacked them in arrangements on the floor and sprayed the overlapping sections yellow, before finally stenciling black stripes onto each. The process resulted in nine similar paintings, intrinsically related by virtue of their genesis and aesthetic and yet each unpredictably unique. In a related series of prints, Hylden screen-printed aluminum plates with an image of a blank canvas—to him, a symbol of emptiness—which he then presented alongside actual blank canvases, revealing his conviction that the processes and materials of painting are themselves pregnant with meaning.