CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/11/2023

Rizzoli Bookstore presents Tina Barney and James Welling on 'The Beginning'

Monday, September 11, Rizzoli Bookstore presents photographers Tina Barney and James Welling in conversation for the New York launch of Tina Barney: The Beginning, published by Radius Books. RSVPs are encouraged. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 PM. Can't attend? Order your signed copy here!

Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. In the summer of 2020, at the height of Covid and quarantine restrictions, Barney began to sort through her archive, which contained hundreds of 35mm negatives taken between 1976 and 1980. Finding these long-forgotten images engendered a rediscovery of some of her most intimate memories as a young artist: “the photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind and thoughts through the summers I spent with family and friends on the East Coast and in Sun Valley, Idaho."

Revisiting her work from decades prior, Barney found herself meditating on who and where she was at the time, as well as why and how she approached specific subjects. What was the impetus to capture these moments? The Beginning encompasses Barney’s nostalgic exploration of her earliest work in the medium, and further reflects a self-examination of this formative period through a critical lens.

Over the course of her 40-year career, acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945) has illuminated the inner lives of her subjects, observing the generational repetition of familial traditions and rituals as played out in domestic settings. Recognized for her large-format photographic portraits realized in vibrant color—and more recently, for her foray into landscape photography—Barney demonstrates the same complexity and sensitivity whether she is shooting world-renowned celebrities or the figures and faces of those known to her personally. Barney’s photographs are in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Zug, Switzerland; among many others. Barney's work was included in the 1987 Whitney Biennial and has been the subject of major recent exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; the Frist Center in Nashville, TN; the Barbican Art Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Museum of Art, Salzburg, Austria. In September 2017, Rizzoli USA published Tina Barney, an eponymous monograph spanning her four-decade international career. Concurrent with the 2023 exhibition at Kasmin, Tina Barney: The Beginning, a book of fifty of the works, was published by Radius Books.

Since the 1970s, when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, American photographer James Welling has become known for a relentlessly evolving body of images that considers both the history and technical specificities of photography. Emerging at a time when the medium focused on its capacity for mimesis, Welling’s work signaled a break with traditional ideas of photography by shifting attention to the construction of images themselves. While the artist produces discrete series whose subject matter ranges widely, his work is united by an examination of what might be termed “states of being” produced by photographically derived images and how such states are, in turn, read by the viewer. 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. Transform, which was on view in New York in 2019, marked his eighth solo presentation with the gallery. Metamorphosis, presented at the gallery’s Hong Kong location in 2021, was the artist’s first solo exhibition in greater China. 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, Lucerne, 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. From 1995 to 2016, Welling was Professor in the Department of Art and Area Head of Photography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 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.

Rizzoli Bookstore
Tina Barney: The Beginning with James Welling
Monday, September 11: 6–8 PM
1133 Broadway
New York, NY 10010