William Wegman: Drawing by Artist @ Huxley-Parlour, London

William Wegman: Drawing by Artist 

Huxley-Parlour, London 

10 March - 22 April 2023 

WILLIAM WEGMAN

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

www.huxleyparlour.com

Animals in Art @ Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj

Animals in Art 
ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj
March 21 – August 9, 2020 UPCOMING: Arken following the recommendations from the Danish authorities regarding the Coronavirus. The museum is therefore closed until further notice.

DANIEL FIRMAN

Nasutamanus, 2012 

Courtesy the artist & Perrotin

Camels and kittens, elephants and rats, feathered creatures and cute pets. ARKEN invites visitors to enter the animal kingdom of art, a realm filled with beautiful, strange and incredible creatures. The exhibition Animals in Art presents works by thirty-four international artists who explore our relationship with animals – and do so with humour, wit and bite.

In recent years, the relationship between humans and animals is widely explored in contemporary art. The exhibition Animals in Art delves into various aspects of this huge field, which includes critical takes on human manipulation of animals as well as cheerful celebrations of animals as wonderful creatures.

LISA STROMBECK

Uniform I, 2008-9

Photo (c) Lisa Strömbeck

Animals in Art explores how we humans use, look at, talk about and anthropomorphise animals. We are regularly seduced by adorable animals on the shelves of toy stores and on the internet; we love our pets and look for the human in them – or for the animal in ourselves. Animals are everywhere in our fables, adventures and mythologies, where we attribute human language and behaviour to them. We are fascinated by wild animals when visiting them at the zoo or in museums, and we tamper with the natural development of species, with the environment and with biodiversity when we produce animals industrially and fiddle with DNA, the building blocks of life. The exhibition offers many different takes on how we see and understand ourselves through other animal species. For example, it explores ‘cuteness’ as a pervasive phenomenon in our consumer and entertainment culture, influencing how we put animals into categories and assess their value.

WILLIAM WEGMAN

Looking Right, 2015 

Photo (c) William Wegman

CANDIDA HOFER

Zoologischer Garten Paris II 1997 

Photo (c) Candida Höfer

Featuring sculpture, installation, paintings, video and photography by thirty-four international artists, Animals in Art forms a sensuous, thought-provoking and engaging menagerie. For example, you can come face to face with a life-sized floating elephant, watch YouTube cats playing atonal piano pieces by Arnold Schönberg and take a fresh look at the artificial environments created by zoos.

KOHEI NAWA

PixCell-Deer #44, 2016 

Photo: Omer Tiroche Gallery

DAVID SHRIGLEY

Untitled (Lay An Egg), 2019  

Courtesy the artist and Galleri Nicolai Wallner

Inside ARKEN’s 150-metre long exhibition space known as the Art Axis, the museum presents fifteen feathered polar bears created by Italian-born artist Paola Pivi. For this presentation, called We are the Alaskan tourists, Paola Pivi has replaced the polar bears’ familiar thick, white fur with light, brightly coloured summery feathers, directing our thoughts away from the harsh climate of Alaska towards southern skies and the carnivals of Brazil. The polar bear is known as The King of the Arctic; a powerful and majestic beast. Today, however, the polar bear has also become a symbol of a dystopian future. It leads an uncertain existence in territories now threatened by climate change. Perhaps this flock of tourists have sought refuge at ARKEN. Adapting to the current climate of our planet, they have replaced their warm fur with frothy feathers.

PAOLA PIVI

It’s not fair, 2013 

Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli 

Courtesy the artist & Perrotin

PETER HOLST HENCKEL

World of Butterflies, 1992-2002 (detail)

Courtesy the artist

The exhibition Animals in Art presents works by Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Richard Barnes, Pascal Bernier, Sophie Calle, Mircea Cantor, Maurizio Cattelan, Mark Dion, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Martin Eder, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Annika Eriksson, Daniel Firman, Laura Ford, Douglas Gordon, Damien Hirst, Peter Holst Henckel, Camille Henrot, Candida Höfer, Carsten Höller, Bharti Kher, Paul McCarthy, Kohei Nawa, Rivane Neuenschwander & Sérgio Neuenschwander, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Patricia Piccinini, Paola Pivi, David Shrigley, Lisa Strömbeck and William Wegman.

ARKEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj
arken.dk

William Wegman at Brooklyn Museum

William Wegman: Funney/Strange
Brooklyn Museum
March 10 - May 28, 2006

The Brooklyn Museum will be the first venue of William Wegman: Funney/Strange, an exhibition exploring forty years of William Wegman’s work in all media. The first retrospective of this artist’s work in more than fifteen years. Included are more than 200 works, among them the signature 20 x 24 Polaroids, early black-and-white and altered photographs, as well as paintings, drawings, collages, artist books, videos, and film.

The exhibition has been organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and curated by the independent curator Trevor Fairbrother. Generous support for this exhibition and publication was provided by The Henry Luce Foundation.

After its premiere at Brooklyn, William Wegman: Funney/Strange will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

An extensive catalogue, written by scholar and critic Joan Simon and published by Yale University Press in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art, will accompany the exhibition.

Underlying all of William Wegman’s work is a light humor that mediates a darker strangeness. The exhibition examines a career that has never been static or predictable yet is woven of interests and explorations that engaged the artist at the start and compel him still. Coming of age in the 1960s, Wegman was an early exponent of Conceptual Art and a pioneering maker of video. He continues to be a video artist and conceptual thinker as well as an adventurous painter, prolific writer, and masterful photographer who is able to create art that amuses and surprises while it challenges and transforms.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943, WILLIAM WEGMAN received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In Illinois and later in Wisconsin, he began to experiment with a wide range of media—film, kinetic sculpture, installation, and performance. While teaching at California State College in Long Beach in the 1970s, William Wegman developed what was to be his mature artistic voice expressed in his signature media of photography, video, and text. It was in California that he acquired his canine muse Man Ray and began to include the dog in both photographs and video. By the fall of 1972, he moved to New York where he has remained ever since, applying his quirky and unpredictable imagination and expansive artistic appetite to a career that has been far ranging and provocative.

Beloved by the general public and held in critical esteem internationally, William Wegman fascinates both audiences for much the same reason: a smart, gently subversive humor that destabilizes the familiar to reveal life’s essential oddity. Throughout his career, he has moved seamlessly from conceptual works to commissioned magazine shoots, from video work to television segments made for Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live; from artist’s books to children’s books, from photographic “landscapes” employing his dogs to his most recent series of paintings that incorporate scenic postcards with drawing, collage, and painting. This exhibition brings classic William Wegman images together with rarely exhibited material and surprising new work to reveal the full range and savvy voice of this remarkable artist’s production.

Trevor Fairbrother is an independent curator and scholar who has worked on a wide range of topics, from Andy Warhol to John Singer Sargent. He has served as a curator of American painting and of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and as Deputy Director for Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Joan Simon is curator-at-large for the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on contemporary art, including Ann Hamilton and Susan Rothenberg. Marilyn Kushner, Chair of the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Brooklyn Museum, is the coordinating curator for the Brooklyn presentation.

William Wegman: Funney/Strange is sponsored at the Brooklyn Museum by Commerce Bank. Additional support is provided by the Brooklyn Museum’s Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund. 

Tour Schedule:

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, March 10–May 28, 2006

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C., July 4–September 24, 2006

Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, November 4, 2006–January 28, 2007

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts April 7–July 31, 2007

BROOKLYN MUSEUM
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
www.brooklynmuseum.org

William Wegman, Texas Gallery, Houston - New Paintings

William Wegman: New Paintings
Texas Gallery, Houston
October 11 – November 12, 2005

Texas Gallery presents a show of new paintings by William Wegman. It is the artist’s eighth show at the gallery since 1973. William Wegman was recognized as an innovator in the early 70s when an artist was able to be recognized for work in more than one medium. Much like Rauschenberg with his experimentation in painting concurrent with his involvement in photography, dance and performance, William Wegman moved between performance, installation, drawing, video and photography. The underlying connection has always been the artists touchstones of oblique humor and slanted references that were conveyed in his influential videos (made in the artists studio with his dog Man Ray) or in his dead pan drawings on typing paper that were illustrated non-sequiturs. In the early 90s the painted photographs of the dogs and watercolor collages made from vintage greeting cards evolved into a series of collaged and illustrated paintings, many very large in scale. As usual there were off beat and strange references and enigmatic scenes though certain themes recurred throughout the last 15 years as the artist has devoted more time to the more traditional mediums of painting and collage. Exploration, travel, the dream world of disjunctive landscapes, and architectural forms that collapsed space and time with abandon were found in the paintings on canvas and these same themes have evolved into the new collaged paintings on board where suddenly the postcard image of the Guggenheim museum leads directly to the Seven Pools in Hana, Maui, Hawaii, or where Mt. Fuji leads one directly to a castle on the Rhine. The works combine both the fantasy of children’s games and a surreal overview of the world as we know, remember and imagine it.

William Wegman lives and works in New York City and eschews most travel. A comprehensive survey show of the work of the last 35 years will open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in March of 2006.

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden, Houston, TX 77019
www.texgal.com