James Welling

Hugely influential among contemporary art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for more than 35 years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph provides the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date. Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has explored realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogues addressing his more than 25 bodies of work. Yet no previous book has attempted to link these works and examine the primary threads that run through them all. Sumptuously produced, this volume presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, interspersed with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. James Crump, Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.
James Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. An earlier survey exhibition, James Welling: Photographs, 1974–1999, originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Solo exhibition venues include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna. Welling is professor in the UCLA Department of Art, where he has taught for more than 15 years, and a visiting professor at Princeton University.

Over the course of three years, from 2006 to 2009, James Welling (born 1951) photographed the Glass House, the architectural landmark estate that Philip Johnson built in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 1949. Welling's photos offer a decided departure from the familiar views of the house and grounds: using digital cameras set on a tripod and holding a variety of filters in front of the lens, he created tinted veils and distortions that transformed the image at the moment of exposure, endowing it with powerful swells of glowing color. As Welling described it in an interview with Artforum, the use of filters enabled his project to become "a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity and color." The 45 images presented here, which invite the viewer to draw associations between the camera's lens and the glass surfaces of the house itself, oscillate before our very eyes between photographic abstraction--a recurrent preoccupation for Welling--and depictions of architecture. With this body of work, Welling has located a wholly new approach to, and blend of, both genres.

This concise and beautiful exhibition catalogue features arresting, colorful, Rorschach Test-like photograms of flowers by the esteemed Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, James Welling. For this series, Welling placed the blossoms of a common southern California plant on sheets of 8x10 film and exposed them to light. The negatives were then projected onto special photo paper through a color mural enlarger and color filters, to produce the dramatic, spectral, almost sun- or moon-dappled images reproduced here. Currently a professor of fine art at UCLA, Welling studied at CalArts in the early 1970s. Welling was the subject of a midcareer retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2000, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is represented in New York by David Zwirner Gallery and in Los Angeles by Regen Projects.