James Welling

Last updated

James Welling (born 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist, photographer and educator living in New York City. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied drawing with Gandy Brodie and at the University of Pittsburgh where he took modern dance classes. Welling transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1971 and received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in the School of Art. At Cal Arts, he studied with John Baldessari, Wolfgang Stoerchle and Jack Goldstein. [1]

Contents

Life and work

Welling began to make photographs in 1976 using a 4x5 view camera. His first body of work, Los Angeles Architecture and Portraits, consisted of photographs of his friends and local architecture. [1] In 1977 he began Diary/Landscape, photographs of his great-grandparents' diary that he paired with landscapes made in Connecticut. [1] In 1978 he moved to New York and began a sequence of abstract photographs, Aluminum Foil, Drapes, Gelatin Photographs. These works were exhibited at Metro Pictures, New York in exhibitions in 1981, 1982 and 1984. [2] [3] In 2002 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the complete set of Aluminum Foil photographs and in 2011 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired the complete Diary/Landscape. [4]

In 1988, Welling began Railroad Photographs, a body of work that documented railroad landscapes in North America. These photographs were exhibited at Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York, documenta 9, Kassel, Germany and Donald Young Gallery, Seattle. In the late 1980s Welling began Degrades, color photograms ranging from 10 x 8 inches to 40 x 30 inches, a project that continues to the present. [5] In 1991 Welling began Light Sources, various sized black and white photographs made in America and Europe. Light Sources was first exhibited at Galerie Philip Nelson in Paris in 1994 and in 2014 the Tate Modern, London acquired a core group of Light Sources. [6]

In 1995 Welling joined the faculty of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. [7] At UCLA Welling began to work with digital technology and with color. In Glass House, (2005–10) Welling photographed of the eponymous home of architect Philip Johnson with an array of colored filters in front of his digital camera. [8] In Wyeth (2009–15) Welling used digital collage and subtle chromatic alterations to record the places where the American artist Andrew Wyeth painted. The complete series was exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum of Art. [9]

Welling returned to modern dance with Choreograph, a series of digital prints consisting of chromatically intense superimpositions of dance, architecture and landscape. Choreograph was exhibited at David Zwirner, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, (both shows designed by Johnston Mark Lee) Galerie Marta Cervera, Madrid, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris and at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, 2020. [10] A companion volume, Choreograph, was published by Aperture in 2020.

Currently, Welling teaches in the Visual Art Program at the Lewis Center at Princeton University. [11]

Recognition and awards

Publications

Exhibitions

Group exhibitions include Indian Summer, Project Inc, Cambridge, 1974; Forest of Signs, MoCA Los Angeles, 1989; documenta 9, Kassel, 1992; Prospect 96, Cologne, 1996; the Whitney Biennial, New York City; 2008; The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, MCA, Chicago, 2012. Solo exhibitions at museums and alternative spaces include, Le Channel, Calais, 1993; Arts Club of Chicago, 1994; the Camden Art Center, London, 1996; Kunstmuseum, Luzern, 1998; Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, 2004; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, 2010; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 2012; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2013. Retrospective shows include Kunsthalle, Bern, 1990; Wexner Center, Columbus, OH, 2000; MoCA, Los Angeles, 2001; the Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, 2002; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, 2002, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 2012; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2012; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 2013; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2013, S. M. A. K, Gent 2017, the KunstForum, Vienna, 2017. [13]

Collections

Welling's work is held in the following permanent collections:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Tillmans</span> German photographer (born 1968)

Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. His work first came to prominence in the mid-1970s through his book The New West (1974) and his participation in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the Hasselblad Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andreas Gursky</span> German artist and photographer

Andreas Gursky is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.

Nicholas Nixon is an American photographer, known for his work in portraiture and documentary photography, and for using the 8×10 inch view camera.

Christopher Williams is an American conceptual artist and fine-art photographer. He lives in Cologne and works in Düsseldorf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Wessel Jr.</span> American photographer and educator (1942–2018)

Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Davidson (photographer)</span> American photographer

Bruce Landon Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, New York City, have been widely exhibited and published. He is known for photographing communities usually hostile to outsiders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elinor Carucci</span> Israeli-American photographer

Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-American Fine Art Photographer of a North-African and Bukharan descent. She is based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Watson (photographer)</span> Scottish photographer

Albert Watson OBE is a Scottish fashion, celebrity and art photographer. He has shot over 100 covers of Vogue and 40 covers of Rolling Stone magazine since the mid-1970s, and has created major advertising campaigns for clients such as Prada, Chanel and Levis. Watson has also taken some well-known photographs, from the portrait of Steve Jobs that appeared on the cover of his biography, a photo of Alfred Hitchcock holding a plucked goose, and a portrait of a nude Kate Moss taken on her 19th birthday.

Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.

Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic. From 1985 until his death in 2013, he taught at California Institute of the Arts. His work frequently focused on large economic systems, or "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."

Thomas Joshua Cooper is an American photographer. He is considered among the premier contemporary landscape photographers.

Vera Lutter is a German artist based in New York City. She works with several forms of digital media, including photography, projections, and video-sound installations. Through a multitude of processes, Lutter's oeuvre focuses on light and its ability to articulate the passing time and movement within a tangible image.

Moyra Davey is an artist based in New York City. Davey works across photography, video, and writing.

Jennifer Pastor is an American sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California Irvine. Pastor examines issues of space encompassing structure, body and object orientations, imaginary forms, narrative and progressions of sequence.

Joyce Neimanas is an American artist known for her unorthodox approach to photography and mixed-media works.

Anthony Hernandez is an American photographer who divides his time between Los Angeles, his birthplace, and Idaho. His photography has ranged from street photography to images of the built environment and other remains of civilization, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as evidence of human presence. He has spent most of his career photographing in Los Angeles and environs. "It is L.A.'s combination of beauty and brutality that has always intrigued Hernandez." La Biennale di Venezia said of Hernandez, "For the past three decades a prevalent question has troubled the photographer: how to picture the contemporary ruins of the city and the harsh impact of urban life on its less advantaged citizens?" His wife is the novelist Judith Freeman.

Sue Williams is an American artist born in 1954. She came to prominence in the early 1980s, with works that echoed and argued with the dominant postmodern feminist aesthetic of the time. In the years since, her focus has never waned yet her aesthetic interests have moved toward abstraction along with her subject matter and memories. She lives and works in New York.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation". Guggenheim.org.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "James Welling (American, born 1951)". Artnet.com. Retrieved June 8, 2022.
  3. ↑ Crump, James (2013). James Welling: Monograph. Aperture. p. 234. ISBN   978-1597112093.
  4. ↑ "David Zwirner Books · James Welling: Diary/Landscape". Davidzwirnerbooks.com. Archived from the original on 2020-10-28.
  5. ↑ "In the Studio: James Welling". Artnews.com. 26 January 2011.
  6. 1 2 "James Welling born 1951". Tate.org.uk.
  7. 1 2 3 "James Welling - Biography | David Zwirner". Davidzwirner.com. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
  8. ↑ Ken Johnson (January 30, 2014), Digital, Analog and Waterlogged The New York Times .
  9. ↑ "Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs". Brandywine.org.
  10. ↑ "JAMES WELLING: CHOREOGRAPH". Eastman.org. Retrieved June 8, 2022.
  11. ↑ "James Welling". Arts.princeton.edy.
  12. ↑ "Past Recipients". International Center of Photography. 2016-05-16. Retrieved 2021-01-14.
  13. ↑ Eipeldauer, Heike (2017). James Welling: Metamorphosis. Prestel. p. 187. ISBN   978-3791356037.
  14. ↑ "James Welling". Artic.edu. 1951.
  15. ↑ "Recent Acquisitions | Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art". Brandywine.org.
  16. ↑ "James Welling". Centrepompidou.fr.
  17. ↑ "James Welling | LACMA Collections". Collections.lacma.org.
  18. ↑ "Search the Collection". Metmuseum.org.
  19. ↑ "James Welling". Mumok.at.
  20. ↑ "James Welling". Moca.org.
  21. ↑ "James Welling | MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 8 June 2022.
  22. ↑ "Artist Info". Nga.gov.
  23. ↑ "James Welling". Whitney.org.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.