Tom and Salman: In General / From the Collection of Mary and Joseh Mograbi

Wayman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a middle-class family and studied psychology before being drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War. During his service (1951–1953), he began drawing caricatures for the amusement of his friends—a defining moment that redirected the course of his life toward art. After his discharge, he moved to New York and studied at Cooper Union, where he was exposed to the generation of Abstract Expressionist artists: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, who dominated the art scene at the time. In contrast to their expressive painting, Wayman chose to create sharp, sensual figurative paintings with a strong visual presence, drawing strength from street signs, magazines, and consumer culture. Thus, he developed a visual language that was at once personal and iconic, formal and seductive.

His work emerged at the heart of the sexual liberation revolution in the United States, as a direct response to the new openness surrounding sexuality, the body, and social norms. It reflects a world in which the seams between private and public, eroticism and artistic representation, and even pornography, began to unravel. Today, these themes resurface from a different perspective, in an era also characterized by waves of conservatism, caution, and renewed censorship. Consequently, Wayman’s work continues to provoke complex questions about gaze, power, representation, and the role of the body in the cultural sphere.

In his major series from the 1960s—Still Life, The Great American Nude, and Bedroom Paintings—Wayman combined fragments of domestic life, male and female bodies, and clear references to art history. He drew inspiration from the works of great modernists, particularly the female nudes of Henri Matisse, in which he found a model for connecting color, body, and sensuality. For Wayman, the nude is not an individual portrait, but a structure of symbols and signs: lips, breasts, cigarettes, furniture, and everyday objects, which together form an image standing between idealization, irony, and a critical gaze on spectacle culture.

The exhibition focuses on works created over the decade and a half from 1960 to 1975, expanding the viewpoint through dialogue with works by his contemporaries alongside contemporary artists, such as Andy Warhol and Mickalene Thomas. These connections offer a way to examine how the images Wayman developed in the mid-20th century continue to resonate, change, and acquire new meanings in the digital age, where boundaries between body, gaze, and media are constantly reshaped.