William Wegman: Drawing by Artist
Huxley-Parlour, London
10 March - 22 April 2023
Plywood Sandwich, 1983
Watercolour on paper, 14 x 17 inches
© William Wegman, courtesy of Huxley-Parlour
Huxley-Parlour present an exhibition of drawings by renowned artist, William Wegman. Relying on puns, homonyms, and visual symmetries, Wegman’s drawings operate in close dialogue with his conceptual photography and video work of the 1970s. Described by critic Joan Simon as making ‘words pursue images’, Wegman’s drawings use linguistic rules against themselves, to create irreverent, quiet, and surreal works.
William Wegman is best known for his conceptual photography involving the weimaraner Man Ray, and the family of weimaraners who followed. He has also worked fluidly across a number of mediums throughout his artistic career: from photography and short video, to painting and drawings. Described as ‘sketches of ideas’, Wegman’s drawings are informal and humorous, yet they are also overwhelmingly conceptual in nature, prefacing strength of concept over aesthetic prowess.
Having moved to Los Angeles in 1970, William Wegman’s conceptual practice emerged as part of a milieu of artists similarly motivated by order, absurdism, and popular culture, canonised as the West Coast Conceptual Art movement. His contemporaries included artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, and Al Ruppersberg, all of whose practice engaged in the core tenets of the conceptual art movement - a prefacing of theoretical premise over form - whilst satirising the sober, academicism of their counterparts in New York.
William Wegman’s drawings, upbeat and irreverent, highlight a fundamental equivalence between conceptual art and humour: a fundamental, semiotic component, capitalising on rules, written and PLYWOOD SANDWICH (1983) WILLIAM WEGMAN visual symmetries, and linguistic anomalies to create quietly arresting and amusing works. William Wegman’s enduring self-awareness, ambitious and surreal approach to conceptual ideas, and his relentless reconciliation of the banal and the surreal coalesce in these works.
WILLIAM WEGMAN was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champain in 1967. Wegman has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants and his work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world. These have included the seminal exhibitions When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta V, as well as a retrospective organised by the Kunstmuseum Lucerne in 1990, which travelled to museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include William Wegman and California Conceptualism, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018, and Being Human, which recently concluded an international four year tour. His most recent publication ‘William Wegman: Writing by Artist’, edited by Andrew Lampert and published by Primary Information in 2022, included many of the drawings in this exhibition.
HUXLEY-PARLOUR
45 Maddox Street, London W1S 2PE
