Though Andy Warhol started out as a commercial illustrator and eventually achieved fame by transforming commercially mass-produced products into high art, it’s easy to forget that he remained a commercial artist his entire career. As in, the man designed some 50 record covers from 1949 until he died in 1987, as wonderfully laid out in Paul Maréchal’s 2008 book Andy Warhol: The Record Covers, 1949-1987 (Prestel). Some of these are more renowned than others—the crotch shot for the Rolling Stones’ 1971 Sticky Fingers comes to mind—but once you see them, they’re unmistakably coming from his brain. His portraits of the artist serve as the covers for Paul Anka’s 1976 The Painter, Russell Means’ 1976 Electric Warrior, Diana Ross’ 1982 Silk Electric, and John Lennon’s posthumous 1986 Menlove Ave, and they look in spirit and style much like his celebrity portraits now found in many art museums—such as the Baltimore Museum of Art, which includes a number of Warhols in its permanent collection (on view in the Contemporary Wing) and where Andy Warhol: The Last Decade is currently installed.

That very little changed when Warhol moved between commercial and gallery work isn’t that remarkable to observe; artists today straddle those lines not only as a matter of fact but as a necessity for survival. What’s more intriguing is to see the visual language of the commercial workplace encroaching on the gallery. The gallery is a space dedicated to and controlled for the looking at and consumption of artwork, and really shouldn’t look like a workshop—unless that’s part of the point. Such is exactly what the artist team Guyton\Walker turn a BMA gallery into for their Front Room installation.

Since 2004, Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, former studio mates, have collaborated on joint installation ideas that are less the sum of their individual arts than an ingenious singular sensibility. Guyton has been known to use desktop printers to make marks on his painting canvases; Walker favors screen-printing and using appropriated imagery that he manipulates. Together as Guyton\Walker they have created installations that straddle the lines of art practice and exhibition, toying with the line that separates where the work is made and where it is experienced.

For its Front Room installation, Guyton\Walker has included four objects (for lack of a better term) and five paintings, all of them untitled. En masse, the installation transforms this front gallery space into a loudly colored factory. A table sits on paint cans to the left when you first enter, a tall rectangular box sits to the right, two piles of drywall lean against another wall, and a line of paint cans sit underneath four canvases on a back wall. The room’s tone feels not so much unfinished as expectant, as if awaiting further instructions.

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