James Welling @ David Zwirner, NYC - "Thought Objects" Exhibition

James Welling: Thought Objects 

David Zwirner, New York 

January 11 – February 10, 2024 

JAMES WELLING 

Staircase, Villa Savoye, 2020/2022 

© James Welling. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of new and recent works by photographer James Welling at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York. James Welling has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005. Thought Objects marks his tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Since the 1970s, when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, James Welling has become known for a relentlessly evolving body of images that considers both the history and technical specificities of photography. His work signaled a break with traditional ideas of photography by shifting attention to the construction of images themselves. 

Thought Objects presents a group of loosely connected works, achieved through a range of digital processes, that together extend Welling’s ongoing investigation into what a photograph can be. Taking his long-standing interest in experimental procedures, such as 1960s psychedelic imagery, as a starting point, with these images James Welling expands his inquiry into how these historic analog processes can be modeled in the digital environment. Borrowing from the physicality of printmaking, the artist marshals the digital tools available to him in unconventional ways to create compositions that are alternately built up in layers, over-saturated, collaged, reticulated, and tonally inverted.

While the works in the exhibition echo subject matter from earlier series, including modernist architecture, flora, and abstraction, James Welling’s pictures ultimately gesture towards the process of their own making. United in their physical appearance, each work is printed in UV-curable ink—which results in a vibrant, almost painterly application of color—and presented with an artist-designed armature that causes the thin panel to appear to float just off the wall, thereby emphasizing their object-quality and imbuing them with a feeling of immateriality that is inherent to the digital realm.

In 2021, James Welling began working on a group of digitally collaged images composed of thin strips excised from different photographs of the same location, aligned in such a way that they read as a coherent image of the place while also appearing abstracted, as though flash-cut from an impression or memory. In photographs such as Pier 24 and The Battery (both 2021), Welling pieces together fragments in varying orientations within a vertical composition, bolstering them with digitally rendered shadows. Likewise in The Salk Institute (2015/2021), he revisits his own images of these two iconic architectural sites, deconstructing and reconstituting them as impressionistic renderings that incite in the viewer an uncanny sense of both recognition and disorientation.

James Welling deploys the notion of collage in a different way in an image of architect Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, New York, which he photographed prior to its 2015 demolition. Here, he combines a morning exposure and an afternoon exposure of the brutalist structure—which appeared in the background of several of his Choreograph (2014–2020) photographs—to create an image of the building reflecting itself, a play on the notion of photographic self-reflexivity.

James Welling’s work with photographic layers in the digital realm is informed by his decades spent working in analog photography, shooting on film and making prints in the darkroom. In 2022, while making his Cento, photographs of ancient statuary hand-inked with oil-based paint, James Welling became interested in the dappled and uneven patterns left behind on the sheets of newspaper that he used to clean his rollers. He started to photograph these accidental offset prints, and used these as the basis for new works. In Hansaviertel Apartment Building (2017/2022), an Alvar Aalto structure in Berlin is overlaid with one such chance impression, retaining the edges of the newspaper as though it were a sieve through which the scene is filtered. In Prouts Neck near Winslow Homer's Studio (2015/2023), the patterning added on top of a photograph of the area of coastal Maine where Winslow Homer worked seems to conjure the seascapes of painter John Marin. An orange and blue offset print overlaid on an image of the neutral-toned Le Corbusier–designed 1928 home in Staircase, Villa Savoye (2020/2022) gives the image a grainy quality that recalls the inadvertent overprints found in makereadys or in double exposures.

In another group of images, James Welling repurposes digital processes designed to sharpen pictures to create distortions, causing the photographs to appear as dimensional bas-reliefs. In works such as Paeonia (2021/2022) and Canna Lily (2021), flowers—an enduring subject for the artist—uncannily seem to extend outward from the work’s surface, and in Oak (2013/2023), a vast tree separates from its verdant surroundings. Finally, in other images, including The Royal Salt-Works of Arc et Senans (1988/2023), Welling takes these manipulations further, bringing together positive and negative images of the same subject to create heavy, almost cartoonish black outlines and strong primary colors. As in all of his Thought Objects, James Welling’s novel and unexpected transformations, achieved with simple digital tools, underscore the fluidity and malleability of photographic images.

JAMES WELLING (b.1951) was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh before receiving his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

In 2022, Dark Matter, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Welling and Thomas Ruff, was on view at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany. Cento, an exhibition focusing on Welling’s recent work on architecture and ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, was presented at Musée des Arts Contemporains, Hornu, Belgium, in 2021. In 2020, Choreograph was on view at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. In 2017, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent, Belgium, and the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna co-organized Metamorphosis, a traveling solo presentation encompassing the artist’s work from over four decades. Things Beyond Resemblance, a solo exhibition hosted in 2015 by the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, presented fifty photographs from the artist’s Wyeth project. The museum also commissioned Welling to create eight site-specific installations, Gradients, which explore the intersection of photography and sculpture. In 2013, a major survey, Monograph, was organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and accompanied by a catalogue published by Aperture. The exhibition traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2012, The Mind on Fire at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, England, explored the origin and development of Welling’s abstract photographs from the 1980s. The show traveled to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Welling’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2010); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, organized a major survey of his work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1990, the artist’s first museum exhibition was presented by Kunsthalle Bern. In 1999, Welling received the DG BANK-Förderpreis Fotografie from the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany. He was a recipient of the 2014 Infinity Award given by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2016 he received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award from Woodbury University, Burbank, California. From 1995 to 2016, Welling was Professor in the Department of Art and Area Head of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and since 2012 he has been a Lecturer with the Status of Professor in the Visual Art Program at the Lewis Center at Princeton University.

James Welling’s work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Vancouver Art Gallery; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. James Welling lives and works in New York.

[*] Thought Objects is the title of a 1987 photo book, the seventh and final installment of Just Another Asshole, a "magazine" issued across different media, organized by Barbara Ess and edited by Ess and Glenn Branca, which contained photos by 125 artists, including James Welling.

DAVID ZWIRNER

533 West 19th Street, New York, NY

www.davidzwirner.com

James Welling @ David Zwirner Gallery, Hong Kong - Metamorphosis

James Welling: Metamorphosis

David Zwirner, Hong Kong

1 April – 8 May 2021

JAMES WELLING

4776, 2015

© James Welling

Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

David Zwirner presents work by the American photographer James Welling, on view across two floors of the gallery’s Hong Kong location. The exhibition will mark the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in Greater China and provides an overview of James Welling’s forty-year career in photography, with key series from the 1980s to the present that highlight his ongoing exploration of abstraction, figuration, color, and process. 

Welling’s first major body of work, Aluminum Foil (1980–1981), is made up of black-and-white close-ups of crumpled aluminum foil. This early work signaled a break with traditional ideas of the medium by shifting attention to constructing images for the camera rather than finding them in the world. The Aluminum Foils initially read as abstractions, but upon further viewing other readings emerge: starry skies, rippling water, summer foliage, geological strata. This tightrope act in which the work hovers between abstraction and representation became one of the hallmarks of Welling’s practice.

Thirty years after Aluminum Foil, Welling began Chemical (2010–), his ongoing series of chemigrams (photographs made in room light with photographic chemicals on black-and-white photo paper). Using different tools to spread liquid and powdered developer across photosensitive material, Welling creates abstractions resembling miniature action paintings. As with the Aluminum Foils, the viewer is presented with an abstraction that lends itself to figurative readings—abstraction on the edge of representation.

James Welling began using color in 2004 for Flowers, a series of photograms (cameraless photographs) that he created until 2017. The first Flowers were made in a color darkroom by layering brightly colored gels above a black-and-white negative of a flower to produce irregular fields of vibrant color. In 2014, James Welling started working with flower imagery on the computer using the red, green, and blue color channels of Photoshop. The work became increasingly psychedelic and several examples of Flowers in the show are among his most intense and vibrant.

As James Welling worked on Flowers, he developed a parallel project, Glass House (2006–2010), photographs of the architect Philip Johnson’s Connecticut home built in 1949. Again, Welling turned to the color filters from the early Flowers, this time holding them up in front of the camera lens. Glass House evolved over four years of visits and encompasses multiple views of The Glass House and the surrounding landscape in all seasons.

In Choreograph (2014–2020), James Welling applied the intense colors of the recent Flowers to superimpose images of landscape, architecture, and modern dance. (Welling studied dance briefly in his early 20s.) For the dance images, he photographed rehearsals and performances of a dozen dance companies, including the LA Dance Project and the Lucinda Childs Dance Company. By compositing these images, Welling produces what could be called “digital collages” where layers of figuration obscure and compete with each other. Bodies, begun in 2018, uses a similar layering technique but emphasizes the body over landscape and architecture. However, in these photographs, we no longer see a modern dancer but rather a god or a mortal from antiquity.  

James Welling continues to picture Greek and Roman sculptures for his most recent series Cento, begun in 2019. After photographing sculptures and objects in dozens of museums around the world, the Cento photographs use a process the artist invented in which he applies oil paint to photographic prints. A cento is a poem made up of lines from other poems. In titling his series Cento, James Welling draws these fragments from antiquity into a new pictorial whole.

JAMES WELLING was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before receiving his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005, and Metamorphosis marks his ninth solo presentation with the gallery. 

Welling’s work has been the subject of a number of significant survey exhibitions. Most recently, in 2017, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent and the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna co-organized Metamorphosis, a traveling solo show encompassing the artist’s work from over four decades. A major survey, Monograph, was organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio and accompanied by a catalogue published by Aperture in 2013. The exhibition traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, organized a major survey of his work, which traveled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Welling’s work was also featured in documenta IX in 1992.

In 2020, Choreograph, a solo exhibition of Welling’s work, was on view at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs was hosted in 2015 by the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and presented fifty works from the artist’s Wyeth project. The museum also commissioned the artist to create eight site-specific installations, Gradients, which explore the intersection of photography and sculpture. In 2012, The Mind on Fire at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, England, explored the origin and development of Welling’s abstract photographs from the 1980s. The show traveled to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.

Additional solo exhibitions have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota (2010); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998); and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (1998). In 1990, the artist’s first museum exhibition was presented by Kunsthalle Bern.

In 2014, James Welling was a recipient of the Infinity Award given by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2016, he received the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award from Woodbury University, California. From 1995 to 2016, Welling was Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and since 2012 he has been a Lecturer with the rank of Professor in Visual Arts and the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

The artist’s work is held in major museum collections internationally, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Vancouver Art Gallery; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong

www.davidzwirner.com

James Welling @ Regen Projects, Los Angeles - Archaeology

James Welling: Archaeology
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Online Exhibition - Through June 20, 2020

JAMES WELLING

Erechtheion. Western facade. Sacred olive tree, karyatids 

and old temple of Athena Polias in foreground, 2019.

© James Welling. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents Archaeology, an exclusive online exhibition of new photographs by James Welling. The works in this exhibition reflect James Welling's long-standing interest in the history and technological processes of the photographic medium, propelling forth a decades long career driven by relentless experimentation. Through a series of distinct printing processes, Welling employs his findings to create images that revive the ancient world.

In describing the genesis of this project, James Welling said:

"I first photographed Greek and Roman antiquities on a fateful visit to the Metropolitan Museum in 2018. The most haunting of the photographs I took that day was of a defaced bust of Julia Mamaea, a third-century Syrian noblewoman, the mother and regent of Emperor Alexander Severus. Her face and head had been violently damaged but her eyes still seemed to shine and she appeared to address me directly. 

I had been researching early photographic processes for a number of years and I decided to print 'Julia Mamaea' using a modified nineteenth-century printing process, collotype, in which I substituted colored dye for lithographic ink. This technique produced aqueous tints ranging from turquoise to lavender to salmon. I printed over 200 'Julia Mamaeas' from the same negative and due to variables of the process, and the fact that I printed some of them backwards, each image was different. The cumulative effect of these multiple Julias was uncanny. It seemed that her clothing, her gaze, even her gender were fluid, changing dramatically from image to image. 

Last summer I visited Athens, where I became fascinated by Greek architecture and sculpture. I took scores of photographs while I was there. When I returned to my studio I adjusted the digital files so that the photographs would mimic black and white nineteenth-century film. The earliest film was not sensitive to blue light and skies were rendered a uniform white while red and yellow tones read darker. In doing this I felt that I was turning photography into a veritable time machine. 

I began printing the Athens work as photolithographs. As I ran the plates through my press, I noticed that the richly inked surfaces were more interesting in themselves than the impressions I was getting. So, I began to think of the inked plate as the final work. Initially I printed the Athens work in black and white but I soon began working in color. Like many photographers I came to the medium through books, and these lithographic plates that I am exhibiting recall the intense black and white, and strange color, photogravures found in my first photography books. 

'Cento' is what I call this part of Archaeology. A cento is a poem made up of quotations and I think of these photographs of Athenian architecture, sculptures, and objects as articulate fragments of the material culture of Greece. 

For 'The Earth, the Temple and the Gods,' the third component of Archaeology, I used multilayered digital filters to color photographs of architecture and sculpture. In antiquity, statues and significant buildings were commonly painted using intense hues and covered with gold leaf that emphasized textile, hair and skin. Modern approximations of these objects are jarring; viewers still accustomed to the blanched surfaces of neoclassic art are repelled by the intense polychromy. I was not interested in recovering the precise colors of antiquity with 'The Earth, the Temple and the Gods'; my hope is that the 'unnatural' colors in which I clothe these works, will seep into the ancient stone and take on a life of their own. 

What have I learned in making this work? The brute violence evident on Julia Mamaea’s head and the horrific disfigurements on almost every Greek and Roman sculpture brought me face to face with the history of intolerance that nearly obliterated the science, literature, and philosophy of antiquity. With Archaeology, I am hoping to restore the spirit and vivacity of the ancient world in all its beauty and complexity." 

James Welling
New York City, 2020

JAMES WELLING (b. 1951) studied Fine Art at Carnegie-Mellon University and Modern Dance at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974. Over the past 40 years he has lived in New York and Los Angeles, where he was a professor in the Department of Art and Area Head of Photography at the University of California Los Angeles from 1995 – 2016. Since 2012 he has been a Lecturer with the rank of Professor in the Visual Arts Program at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.

Surveys of James Welling’s work have been held at museums throughout the United States and Europe including the George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2020); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2017); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2016); Brandywine River Museum of Art, Chadds Ford (2015); Art Institute of Chicago (2014-2015); Fotomuseum Winterthur (2013-2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013-2014); Cincinnati Art Museum (2013); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2002); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2000); The Baltimore Museum of Art (2000); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1998-1999); Kunstmuseum Luzern (1998); and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (1992).

James Welling’s work has also been included in major museum exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2013, 2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012-2013, 1988); Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (2012); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012, 2003-2004); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002, 1987); Kunsthalle Bern (1997, 1990); Denver Art Museum (1994); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987).

REGEN PROJECTS
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.regenprojects.com

James Welling, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris - Chronology

James Welling: Chronology 

Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris 

25 janvier – 2 mars 2017 

La galerie Marian Goodman présente pour la première fois une exposition de James Welling. En parallèle, le Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K) à Gand lui consacre une grande rétrospective, Metamorphosis, qui voyagera ensuite au Kunstforum de Vienne.

L’exposition Chronology réunit de nouvelles œuvres aux côtés de photographies récentes et d’une sélection de ses premiers travaux. James Welling s’essaie à la peinture, la danse, la vidéo, la sculpture, la performance avant de se tourner progressivement et définitivement vers la photographie au milieu des années 1970. Autodidacte, il explore dès lors les potentialités du médium en expérimentant divers procédés (Polaroids, tirage argentique, tirage jet d’encre, photogramme, chimigramme etc). Intéressé avant tout par le caractère imprévisible de la photographie, James Welling s’engage délibérément dans différentes directions ; la matière, l’abstraction, la couleur, l’espace. L’exposition illustre toute la diversité de cette œuvre et met en évidence des continuités formelles et conceptuelles.

Praticien novateur, James Welling ne cesse d’inventer des modus operandi dont une grande part se déroule en chambre noire. Inspirées du travail de Moholy-Nagy, Hands (1975/2016) sont des tirages négatifs de photogrammes des mains de l’artiste. « En photographie, je distingue les photogrammes des images prises avec un objectif. Le modèle pour les images obtenues avec un objectif se fonde sur une conception de l’image héritée de la Renaissance tandis que le photogramme est l’ombre d’un objet sur une surface photographique. » Il approfondit cette technique comme en témoignent les New Flowers (2016). Contrairement à la série Flowers (2004-2007), il construit numériquement ces photogrammes à partir de multiple négatifs. Un autre procédé ne nécessitant pas le recours à l’appareil photographique, le chimigramme permet la réalisation d’images avec le seul concours de la lumière, de produits chimiques et du jeu du hasard ; Welling l’utilise dans sa série Chemical (2015-16) et fait disparaître la frontière entre photographie et peinture.

La couleur tient une place centrale dans les œuvres présentées dans l’exposition. Ses premières expérimentations chromatiques remontent aux années 1970 quand il enrichit l’intensité colorée de ses Polaroids, tels que Red Dawn ou Studio With Coat (1976), en les mettant en contact à la chaleur. C’est cependant au cours de la période pendant laquelle il enseigne à l’University of California à Los Angeles (UCLA) de 1995 à 2016 que Welling affine ses recherches chromatiques, dont la série Degradés (2005) en est l’exemple le plus éclatant. « A mesure que je suis devenu sensible aux couleurs non naturelles, j’ai pris conscience qu’elles n’étaient pas artificielles c’est juste que je ne les avais pas remarquées. Le fait d’être en harmonie avec la couleur m’a mené à penser qu’en réalité nous voyons plus de couleurs que nous en percevons normalement. Je crois que d’une certaine manière j’essaie de libérer la couleur ». Les variations de couleurs peuvent participer parfois à construction des images comme avec Glass House (Lavender Mist)(2014). James Welling a placé devant l’objectif de son appareil un filtre couleur lavande jouant avec la transparence du matériau de la maison. De la même manière les couleurs obtenues avec Photoshop deviennent l’un des éléments constituants des œuvres Choreograph, chacune est construite à partir de trois photographies noir et blanc superposées et respectivement colorées en rouge, vert et bleu dans le système RVB du logiciel. Enfin dans les photographies de la série Meridian prises dans une imprimerie à Rhode Island, Welling souligne le lien entre la reproduction mécanique et la photographie en altérant subtilement les couleurs du fichier

numérique. 

Si James Welling décide en 1976 de se consacrer pleinement à la photographie, il n’en a pas pour autant exclu de sa pratique d’autres disciplines artistiques, l’architecture figurant parmi ses grandes sources d’inspiration. Notamment les vues noir et blanc fragmentées de bâtiments de Los Angeles Architecture réalisées de nuit ou ses images polaroid qui montrent sa fascination pour l’espace et les volumes. La série Glass House (2006-2014) est entièrement consacrée à la maison construite par l’architecte Philip Johnson en 1949 à New Canaan dans le Connecticut, perçue comme une gigantesque sculpture et photographiée à différentes saisons. De même avec Choreograph, la danse qu’il avait pratiquée et étudiée pendant ses études revient au centre de son travail. Il superpose des clichés de danseurs professionnels pris lors de répétitions avec des vues d’architecture de Paul Rudolph, Rudolf Steiner et Marcel Breuer et/ou celles de paysages du Connecticut ou de Suisse. Ces paysages à peine perceptibles sont à la fois une toile de fond et une scène pour les figures dansantes. Enfin, la peinture a toujours tenu une place importante ; Seascape, son nouveau film présenté dans l’exposition, traduit également cette affinité : James Welling y utilise des séquences d’un film 16mm tournées au début des années 1930 par son grand-père qui avaient servi d’étude pour la réalisation d’une marine. James Welling a recolorisé numériquement ce film à partir d’échantillons de la dite peinture et son frère a conçu la musique.

JAMES WELLING est né à Hartford, Connecticut en 1951. Il vit et travaille à New York. Il étudie à la Carnegie-Mellon Université à Pittsburg puis au California Institute of the Arts à Los Angeles (Cal Arts), où il suit notamment le cours « post-studio » de John Baldessari. Il est considéré comme l’un des membres de la « Picture Generation » aux cotés d’artistes comme Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman ou Richard Prince, salués pour leur approche innovante de la photographie dans les années 1970-1980. De 1995 à 2016, il enseigne au sein du département d’art à l’University of California à Los Angeles (UCLA) et depuis 2012 il est professeur invité de l’Université de Princeton. En 2012 et 2013 deux expositions majeures ont présenté l’ensemble de son œuvre : Monograph, organisée par le Cincinnati Art Museum et le Hammer Museum à Los Angeles, puis Mind on Fire présentée à la MK Gallery, Milton Keynes en Angleterre, au Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanéa, Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle en Espagne et à la Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver au Canada. En 2014 il a reçu le Prix d’Infinité du Centre International de la Photographie, New York et en 2016 le Prix d’excellence de l’Institut de Julius Shulman de l’Université de Woodbury, Californie.

Ses œuvres font partie des collections des plus grands musées internationaux: le Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; Le MoMA, New York ; Solomon R ; Guggenheim Museum, New York ; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography ; Vancouver Art Gallery ; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut et le Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Allemagne. 

GALERIE MARIAN GOODMAN

79 rue du Temple, 75003 Paris

www.mariangoodman.com

James Welling: Choreograph, Regen Projects, Los Angeles

James Welling: Choreograph

Regen Projects, Los Angeles

February 19 – March 26, 2016

Regen Projects presents an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist JAMES WELLING. Choreograph features James Welling’s most recent series of inkjet prints that incorporate dance, architecture, and landscape in each image. This marks the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at the gallery.

After seeing the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform in 1970, James Welling studied dance briefly at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971 he stopped dancing to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where he concentrated on photography. Choreograph marks James Welling’s return to dance, albeit through photographic imagery.

To create these works James Welling photographed over a dozen dance companies in New York, Philadelphia, Ottawa, and Los Angeles. The dance photographs were then merged with photographs of architecture (buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph) and landscape imagery (western Connecticut, southern Florida, and Switzerland) in Photoshop’s fundamental red, green, and blue color channels, which are basic to all color photographs. The resulting electronic files were altered by the artist using Photoshop’s Hue and Saturation layers to create complicated, multi-hued photographs, which were then printed on rag paper using a 10 color Epson Stylus Pro 9900 inkjet printer.

About Choreograph James Welling writes:

Since 2005 I have been making photographs by tinkering with trichromatic color. In Choreograph I’m putting different images into the trichromatic red, green and blue color channels of Photoshop to produce some very strange looking pictures. (Normative color photographs place the same image into the color channels.) Each Choreograph is a unique solution to the problem of balancing this strange amalgam of superimposed bodies, buildings and open spaces with the most unexpected color combinations that arise from this way of working.

Writing on Choreograph in Artforum in February 2016, art historian Robert Slifkin notes:

Welling has repeatedly found ways to use photography’s vital lexicon to reinterpret – and literally remediate – certain contested artistic operations such as painterly gesture, the associative power of landscape, and the sensuous investigation of color. 

For his exhibition at Regen Projects, James Welling collaborates on the exhibition design with Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee. 

JAMES WELLING (b. 1951 in Hartford, CT) studied at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before receiving both his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He lives and works in Los Angeles where he is a professor and area head of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught since 1995.

James Welling’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions. Recent shows include the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the Art Institute of Chicago (both 2015). In 2013 a major survey exhibition, Monograph, traveled from the Cincinnati Museum of Art to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Other museum shows include the University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2010); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (both 2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (both 1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, organized a major survey of Welling’s work, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Works by the artist are included in prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Vancouver Art Gallery; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

He has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the 2014 International Center of Photography Infinity Award and will receive the Julius Shulman Institute Excellence in Photography Award from Woodbury University, California in 2016.

REGEN PROJECTS

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Jack Goldstein x 10,000 at The Jewish Museum, NYC

Jack Goldstein x 10,000
The Jewish Museum, New York
Through September 29, 2013

JACK GOLDSTEIN 

Still from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975 16mm film; color; sound; 3 min. 

Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 at the Jewish Museum in New York is the first American museum retrospective devoted to the work of Canadian-born artist JACK GOLDSTEIN (1945-2003). This comprehensive exhibition brings to light Jack Goldstein’s important legacy, revealing his central position in the Pictures Generation of artists of the 1970s and 1980s. The impressive range of the artist’s imagination is explored through Jack Goldstein’s influential films and paintings as well as his pioneering sound recordings, installations, and writings. Ten years after his untimely death in 2003, Jack Goldstein’s work is exerting fresh influence, especially among younger artists. With Jack Goldstein x 10,000, The Jewish Museum provides audiences who may not be familiar with his work an in-depth understanding of an extraordinary art innovator. 

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, where it was presented in 2012. The Jewish Museum in New York is the only other venue for the show, which includes nearly 40 works of art, along with rare writings providing a context for the reappraisal of Jack Goldstein’s contributions.

JACK GOLDSTEIN: BIOGRAPHY & EXHIBITION

Born to a Jewish family in Montreal in 1945, Jack Goldstein moved to Los Angeles as a child. A member of the first graduating class of the California Institute of Arts (CalArts), Goldstein emerged as a key figure in the Pictures Generation and as a peer of such celebrated figures as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, and James Welling, among others, participated in a fundamental shift in American art during the late 1970s. Enthralled by mass culture, the Pictures Generation artists took photography, film and performance in new directions, and expanded the stylistic vocabulary of painting and drawing by appropriating images from books, magazines, advertisements, television and film.

In the late 1960s Goldstein made Minimalist sculpture, arrangements of wooden blocks and other objects precariously held together by gravity—a metaphor for the contingency and fragility of life. He soon turned to staged performances, several of which were performed in New York City in the mid-1970s. An example of Jack Goldstein’s sculpture as well as his performance portfolio is on view.

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 brings together 17 films, spanning the years 1971 to 1983. As art historian Douglas Crimp recalls in the exhibition catalogue, “They were quite unlike any other films I'd seen up to that point." Each film opens with a fixed, close-up view of an object on a plain background. Its detachment from its original context leaves a space in the viewer’s mind for new meanings to enter. Although short—from just over half a minute to about eleven minutes—the films tend to literalize the passage of time, often by requiring viewers to watch a single image or fragment that repeats itself over and over. Exhibition highlights include his celebrated 1975 film of the growling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. Another signature work is the 1978 film The Jump, featuring a leaping diver, performing a somersault and disintegrating into fragments.

Jack Goldstein also began to appropriate and remix recorded sound and image; by the mid-1970s he was producing vinyl records as artworks, editing together stock film-industry sound effects of unnerving or frightening moments. Thus, while his films are based on performed events his records have a more direct link to commercial culture. Jack Goldstein x 10,000 includes a selection of 19 records which visitors can see as well as listen to.

By 1980 Jack Goldstein was starting to paint. His first canvases, with their sleek surfaces, monumental size, and photographic gleam, retained the cinematic polish of his records and films. His images derive from appropriated pictures, ranging from World War II and nature photographs to computer-generated abstractions. He continued his exploration of mortality, depicting violent yet ethereal landscapes. He hired assistants to execute the paintings, giving them photographs and instructions. Implied in his disappearance from the artwork is his disappearance from the world; here as elsewhere a deep, existential anxiety permeates his work.

Throughout Goldstein’s career, words had been a presence in his work, particularly aphorisms and other short pas¬sages based on appropriated texts. He considered his final work, the immense, seventeen-volume Selected Writings, his autobiography. In the last decade of his life he lived in obscurity in East Los Angeles, voraciously reading philosophy books backwards. He extracted passages he found interesting and pieced them together to construct a personal narrative, an amalgamation of appropriated texts by other authors in which his own identity is deeply hidden within a chorus of voices.

The exhibition also includes a selection of photographs by James Welling of Jack Goldstein’s studio in Los Angeles. James Welling’s photographs offer a tantalizing look at the artist’s creative world – particularly fascinating for an artist who deliberately suppressed his own presence in his art.

With his films and paintings, Jack Goldstein achieved a level of art-world recognition and visibility. By the late 1980s, struggling with depression and a drug dependency, Goldstein returned to California, where he spent most of the next decade out of sight. He was planning an exhibition of paintings in Los Angeles at the time of his death by suicide in 2003.

Over the past decade interest in Jack Goldstein’s work has grown. The exhibition positions Goldstein as one of the leading artists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Exhibition Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a 240-page, fully illustrated catalogue co-published with Prestel. Included are essays by Philipp Kaiser, Douglas Crimp, and Alexander Dumbadze, as well as a photo essay by James Welling. The catalogue also includes a previously unpublished 2001 interview with Goldstein by artist Meg Cranston. 

Related Program Highlights

The Jewish Museum is offering a diverse series of programs related to the Jack Goldstein exhibition featuring such artists and curators as John Baldessari, Douglas Crimp, and Robert Longo. On Thursday, May 23, 2013, Douglas Crimp, Critic and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, and Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at The Jewish Museum, will discuss Goldstein as a pioneer of conceptual art practices. Douglas Crimp curated a legendary Pictures exhibition in 1977. On Wednesday, September 11, 2013 in How is Jack Goldstein?, John Baldessari and R.H. Quaytman will share their reflections and impressions of Jack Goldstein in this intergenerational dialogue moderated by Jens Hoffmann. As Goldstein’s instructor at CalArts in the early 1970s, John Baldessari greatly informed the late artist’s work. R.H. Quaytman continues the tradition of appropriation and mechanical reproduction. On Sunday, September 22, 2013, as part of the symposium, Who is Jack Goldstein?, panel discussions will examine the circumstances of the art world during the 1970s and 1980s along with the impact of the Pictures Generation on artists today. Artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher will present the keynote lecture and panelists will include artists Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, James Welling, and Kathryn Andrews, among others. More information on the museum's website.

Jack Goldstein x 10,000 was organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by guest curator Philipp Kaiser. The Jewish Museum presentation has been organized by Joanna Montoya, Neubauer Family Foundation Assistant Curator. 

This exhibition is made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Additional support is provided by Jean and Tim Weiss, the National Endowment for the Arts, Barbara and Victor L. Klein, and Karyn D. Kohl. The Jewish Museum presentation is made possible by the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art. Generous support is also provided by Venus Over Manhattan. 

Also on view at the Jewish Museum in NYC: As it were … So to speak. A Museum Collection in Dialogue with Barbara Bloom and Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh, through August 4, 2013.

The Jewish Museum's website: www.thejewishmuseum.org

James Welling, Galerie Nelson, Paris

James Welling 

Galerie Nelson, Paris 

16 décembre 2000 - 27 janvier 2001 

La galerie Nelson présente les dernières oeuvres de la série des New Abstractions du photographe américain JAMES WELLING ainsi que sa nouvelle série des Mystery Photographs.

La série des New Abstractions, commencée en 1998, est composée de photographies de format vertical où s’entrecroisent des bandes noires plus ou moins nombreuses sur un fond uniformément blanc. Le rendu est très contrasté. Cette série a été réalisée à partir de photogrammes (1) de petit format qui ont été digitalisés puis agrandis pour aboutir à des tirages argentiques de grand format. Afin d’obtenir le photogramme original, des bandes de papier bristol ont été jetées et arrangées sur des feuilles de papier photo puis exposées à la lumière. James Welling explique au sujet de ces photographies : “J’ai décidé d’inverser la tonalité des images parce que je les vois comme des lignes noires sur un champ blanc lumineux, comme lorsqu’on regarde le ciel à travers la charpente d’une maison en cours de construction”. Avec ces photographies, James Welling poursuit son travail sur la lumière, abordé avec la série des Light Sources (1995-1998) qui ont été présentées à la galerie en 1998. Les New Abstractions ont été exposées pour la première fois en 1999 au Sprengel Museum de Hanovre à l’occasion du prix pour la photographie de la DG Bank, remis à James Welling. Elles sont aujourd’hui présentées pour la première fois en France.

Parallèlement aux New Abstractions, James Welling a commencé cette année une nouvelle série : les Mystery Photographs également exposées pour la première fois en France. De la même façon, des bandes traversent l’espace monochrome. Mais cette fois, la photographie est floue, colorée, moins contrastée. Dans cette série, il expose successivement le papier photo à des faisceaux de lumières colorées, faisant apparaître des striures de couleur au travers de la surface monochrome. Des formes abstraites, fugitives et mystérieuses affleurent la surface qui opère comme un voile trouble. 

(1) Le photogramme est une photographie faite sans appareil photo, en plaçant des objets, des mains ... sur du papier photo puis en les exposant à la lumière. Les objets sont en général directement placés sur le papier et les formes obtenues sont nettement définies.

GALERIE NELSON

40 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris

www.galerie-nelson.com