Wes Lang's Heroes of Love...

Last month, LA-based artist Wes Lang unveiled The Black Paintings, a monumental series of works that play like storyboards to a raucous midnight horror movieand a spiritual quest. Here, GQ collaborates with the artist on a fashion story that brings his stylish characters off the canvas.

- Will Welch

WES LANG HAS BECOME increasingly reclusive.

Fifty-two years old in September, the prolific Jersey-born, LA-based painter once architected a run of widely influential crossover moments between art and pop culture through a coveted series of drawings executed on hotel stationery at the Chateau Marmont (2011), album artwork for the Grateful Dead's sprawling Spring 1990 box set (2012), and paradigm-shifting merch for Kanye West's Yeezus tour (2013). All while busting out a frighteningly consistent array of paintings and drawings, which he's shown in recent years at galleries like Almine Rech in Paris and One Trick Pony in LA, but mostly sold independently out of his Boyle Heights studio. Among artists, he occupies a singular position-simultaneously working at the centre of culture while often standing outside the art world-industrial complex.

Since the pandemic, Lang has gone even deeper underground. Over the last three years, he's gotten married, moved out to the suburbs, had a son, and quietly removed himself from the LA radar. These days, his 11,000-square-foot studio, which used to be "like Grand Central station", he says, rarely accepts visitors-and, anyway, he just as often paints from a new space in the back of his home. No new work has left either studio in the arms of collectors.

So what's he been making while hiding out? Well, now we know.

Lang has just re-emerged with The Black Paintings, an immense series of 96 paintings and 96 drawings that are on display from September 2024 to March 2025 at Damien Hirst's Newport Street Gallery in London.