CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/31/2025

In Wes Lang's 'Black Paintings,' skulls and skeletons as "fully functioning, realized beings"

Whether it’s Halloween or Day of the Dead that you celebrate, you can’t do better than Wes Lang: The Black Paintings, published by Heni. “Something grabbed me about the skull when I was in elementary school and it was so inexplicable to me,” Lang is quoted by essayist Wallace Ludel. “It was like they were talking to me immediately and I just couldn’t let it go. I don’t want to call it an obsession because it wasn’t unhealthy, but I had to keep exploring it and coming back to it.… I keep following it and it keeps providing new insights. The skulls in these works are so alive, there’s so much happening and they’re living and moving through these different worlds and scenes. I see them as fully functioning, realized beings.” Pictured here, “Coronation” (2023).