Since the 1970s, when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, American photographer James Welling (b. 1951) 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 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 statuary, 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.
The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005, and in that time has had nine shows with the gallery. His tenth solo exhibition, Thought Objects will be on view in New York in January 2024. 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 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. Welling lives and works in New York.
November 5, 2022–March 5, 2023
Thomas Ruff and James Welling are among the best-known photographic artists of the present day. In their works, they explore the conditions of visual perception, also in relation to our use of the photographic apparatus, and the conditioning of our view of the world through photographic images. The exhibition Dark Matter. Thomas Ruff, James Welling focuses on works that wrest new possibilities from the photographic image and expand our powers of imagination. We perceive our environment subjectively, we see and feel it against the background of what we can grasp and understand in traditional images and words. Around eighty per cent of the matter in the universe consists of a substance that we do not know: Dark matter. Is it similar with the photographic image? Does it hide more than it shows?
Learn more at Kunsthalle Bielefeld.
November 6, 2021–February 13, 2022
The Sprengel Museum Hannover mounted TRUE PICTURES?, a major exhibition that—for the first time on this scale—presented key developments and trends in Canadian and US photography from 1980 to the present. It explores artists’ responses to the advent of digital photography and the digitization of the image with all of its technical possibilities, including the medium’s dissociation from the original phenomenon.
The three generations of artists presented here have also experienced periods of upheaval and challenges throughout society and the political arena. These range from the 1968 protests, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the AIDS pandemic to racism, preoccupation with feminist theory, identity issues, and the questioning of perceptions surrounding sexuality and gender—topics that, in many cases, have not lost their urgency to this day. In addition to narrative and politically motivated stances, the works of the younger artists include subjective and transmedial approaches that express the visual culture of the 21st century.
Among the thirty-six artists occupying a roughly 2000 sqm space are Walead Beshty, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, Martine Gutierrez, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, Jeff Wall, and James Welling.
Learn more at the Sprengel Museum.
May 23–August 29, 2021
The Musée des Arts Contemporains Cento (2021), is a solo exhibition by James Welling, where he debuted his photographic work on architecture and ancient Greek and Roman statuary. The exhibition’s title, Cento, refers to the ancient practice of assembling fragments of various poetic or musical works. Welling’s current series, which began in 2018, captures photographic segments of ancient sculpture and architecture. He infuses his photographs with overlays of unnatural tones and tints, leading us to contemplate the poetics and conceptions of modern and archaic color.
“Intense colors and gold leaf emphasized textile, hair and skin,” Welling explains in relation to Cento and its homage to Greek statuary. “Modern approximations of this polychrome are startling to viewers still accustomed to the colorless neoclassic ideals of beauty. But I was not interested in simply recreating the colors of the Ancient Greeks. Using digital technology, I applied highly unnatural colors to the sculptures. My hope is that these colors seep into the ancient stone and take on a life of their own.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in the form of eight limited edition postcards with works selected by the artist from his Centro series.
Learn more at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu
April 23–August 15, 2021
With the idea of Europe and the nation-state more broadly in crisis, a deep division between those wishing its calcification and those wishing its dissolution grows. The need to reevaluate our ideals, values, and history is strongly needed if we are to move forward together in a shared future. The exhibition Europe: Ancient Future (2021) attempts to grapple with this human bind between the individual and their society—a perplexity that has been repeatedly reformulated since antiquity. The show explores the stories and ideas of invited artists whose images and works refer to a past while simultaneously shining a guiding light on our present and possible future. Around a dozen renowned artists approach, in quite different and yet particular ways, these wide-ranging themes, which for all their contradictions, share an interest in a constructive interplay of individual and society and in opening up possible alternative histories of Europe.
In his series The Earth, the Temple and the Gods, featured in the exhibition, the American photographer James Welling works with the architecture of the Acropolis and the Agora in Athens. He uses digital and, in part, forgotten analog technologies to breathe the color back into objects and sculptures that have faded over time—colors that not only get “under their skin” but also awaken them to a new life.
In order to capture and expand on this discussion, an extensive supporting program is being offered with the participation of guest scholars and artists and a substantial publication is being prepared to accompany it.
Learn more at Halle Für Kunst Steiermark.
July 26, 2020–January 3, 2021
“By choosing to use ‘choreograph,’ drawing with space, as a noun, I am noting its similarity to ‘photograph,’ drawing with light.” — James Welling
James Welling’s recent body of work integrates several strands of his artistic exploration over the past forty years. Each Choreograph work consists of a large inkjet print combining images of dance, architecture, and landscape in layers of distinctive, luminous color. The works prompt associations with bodies in motion, eliciting sensations of momentum, force, and rhythm.
Every work in the series begins with three black-and-white photographs, each digitally entered into one of three color channels—red, green, or blue—in Photoshop and combined into a single image. Welling makes adjustments until the picture resolves to its final form, which he secures by making an inkjet print. The result is a dense visual field infused with the science of color perception, the psychosomatic experience of physical space, and the history of photographic representation.
Learn more at George Eastman Museum.
January 21–May 31, 2020
The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Platinum Photographs, featuring more than two dozen striking prints made with platinum and palladium photographic process. Drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition explores the wide variety of visual characteristics that have come to define the allure and beauty of this medium, which include a velvety matte surface, wide tonal range, and neutral palette. Introduced in 1873 by scientist William Willis Jr., the use of platinum was quickly embraced by both professional and amateur photographers alike and helped to establish photography as a fine art.
With the price of metal soaring, the popularity of platinum paper declined in the years leading up to the First World War. The scarcity of materials and eventual shifting aesthetic preferences led many photographers to abandon the process in favor of gelatin silver prints. Interest in the process was renewed, however, in the mid-20th century, and a relatively small, but dedicated number of photographers continue to use the process today. More recent examples include a double portrait by artist Madoka Takagi featuring herself, arms crossed, and a shirtless man covered in tattoos, both gazing stoically into the camera’s lens; a suburban night scene by Scott B. Davis; and an experiment in abstraction by James Welling.
Learn more at The Getty Center.
March 16–September 29, 2019
In celebration of its 20th anniversary, S.M.A.K. presented The Collection (I): Highlights for a Future (2019). Inspired partly by the architecture of the S.M.A.K. building, the exhibition was divided into seven sub-presentations, each of which spotlit current trends within the art world and society, illustrating them with works from the museum’s collection. The culmination of diverse works demonstrates the impossibility of capturing social reality and the art world in one overarching linear storyline or concept. Visitors immersed themselves in the labyrinth of contemporary art and discovered for themselves possible connections between the various artworks from the museum’s collection.
Learn more at S.M.A.K.
February 14–May 13, 2018
It’s the 1980s as you’ve never seen it before. Explore the iconic decade when artwork became a commodity and the artist, a brand. Razor-sharp, witty, satirical, and deeply subversive, these nearly 150 works examine the origins and rise of a new generation of artists in 1980s New York who blurred the lines between art, entertainment, and commerce, a shift that continues to define contemporary art today.
This expansive exhibition presents a fresh and focused history of the decade, bringing rarely displayed works from U.S. and European collections together for the first time since the ’80s. The artists feature some of today’s most influential figures: Ashley Bickerton, Sarah Charlesworth, Jessica Diamond, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Joel Otterson, Richard Prince, Erika Rothenberg, Haim Steinbach, Meyer Vaisman, Julia Wachtel, and James Welling, as well as artist collectives and projects such as ACT UP Gran Fury, The Offices, General Idea, Fashion Moda, and Guerrilla Girls. Three major installations are recreated for the first time in thirty years, including seminal works by Gretchen Bender, Barbara Bloom, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018) is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue. This groundbreaking book tells the story of the evolution of New York’s downtown art scene in the 1980s—from a DIY counterculture in the East Village to a legitimate gallery business in SoHo. Coinciding with the rise of modern branding and the onset of the information age, artists’ focus on commodities and consumerism began as satire but came to be much more complex: commodities and associated phenomena, such as advertising, now served as vessels for ideas, politics, and personal relationships in “brand-new” types of painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and performance.
Learn more at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
James Welling is known for his peripatetic practice, using diverse strategies to produce works that are at times representational, at times abstract, and often, paradoxically, both. Welling harnesses the elemental components of photography—light, color, and movement—to produce distinctly original work, while remaining keenly aware of the medium’s history. His experimental approach and his sensitivity to the physical and technical properties of his medium has influenced an entire generation of younger artists.
0472 (2017) is included in a benefit exhibition in New York to support Thread, a Senegal-based non-profit established by The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. On view at the gallery's 19th Street space through July 21, 2017, this exhibition celebrates the project's two-year anniversary and includes artworks generously donated by 26 gallery artists, the proceeds of which will go directly to Thread. With this fundraiser, Thread will be able to establish an endowment so that it can operate in perpetuity in the region.
This photograph by James Welling is part of an ongoing series of works begun in 2006 which documents Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House built in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut. The series was produced using a digital camera, and its resulting images capture the architectural features of Johnson’s 47-acre compound. To achieve his luminous effects, the artist placed a variety of colored filters between lens and subject to introduce intense fields of color, transforming the image at the moment of exposure. Here, Welling continues to explore his longtime interest in using layering effects and filtering combinations to explore color phenomena and trichromatic (RGB) vision, the process by which our eyes and brain work together to perceive the visible spectrum.
The reflective, transparent façade of Johnson's diaphanous structure combines light, interior, and exterior to describe architectural space. Welling has elaborated on the physical and conceptual properties of his interventions, explaining how Johnson's "glass box […] seems like a conceptual sculpture, a gigantic lens in the landscape. When I realized I could make the glass red or add reflections to the face of this supposedly transparent house, my project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color."¹
¹ James Welling, in correspondence with the gallery, 2010.
Metamorph
Music composed and performed by William B. Welling
℗ © 2017 William B. Welling, Averill Park, NY USA
May 5–July 16
Kunstforum Wien presented James Welling's first major European survey, featuring a selection of works by the American artist from the early 1970s to the present. Welling's practice, which reflects fundamental changes in photography during recent decades, shuffles the elemental components of the medium to produce distinctly uncompromising work.
The exhibition traveled to Vienna from Ghent in Belgium, where it was presented at S.M.A.K. in January 2017. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication which includes texts by co-curators Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann and an interview with Welling by Hal Foster. Published by S.M.A.K. | Prestel
James Welling: Metamorphosis is a publication accompanying the artist’s first European survey exhibition, on view at Kunstforum Wien in Vienna through July 16. The exhibition was first presented at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent, Belgium, in January 2017.
The publication includes texts by co-curators Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann and an interview with the artist by Hal Foster. Published by S.M.A.K. | Prestel
James Welling
September 16, 2017–January 7, 2018
James Welling participated in the second Chicago Architecture Biennial, a citywide architecture and design exhibition. The theme for 2017, selected by the Artistic Directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, was "Make New History."
As part of an exhibition titled A Love of the World, The City Gallery at the Water Tower presented photographs, commissioned by the Biennial, from Welling's Chicago series (1986-2017). The photographs were taken at the Illinois Institute of Technology campus—which Welling first visited and photographed in 1987—and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, both of which were designed by Mies van der Rohe and are closely associated with modernist architecture of the 1950s. Also as part of this exhibition, the artist's Chicago works have been reproduced in large scale and installed on the exterior of the the Chicago Cultural Center building through the summer of 2019.
"Architecture has long been one of James Welling's primary inspirations," notes Interior Design magazine, ". . . For the recent Chicago series, Welling has turned his attention to work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . . . Digital techniques were used to artificially saturate the photographs, imposing Welling's palette on the architect’s work. 'I was especially interested in combining intense colors with the monochromatic colors of Mies,' Welling writes."
James Welling
July 10–August 4
Seascape, a new film by James Welling, made its United States debut in the artist's solo exhibition at the gallery in 2017.
In Seascape, Welling combines his family's past with the histories of cinema, photography, and painting. The film is an homage to the artist's grandfather, William C. Welling, who studied with the American Impressionist painter Wilson Irvine and corresponded with the seascape painter Frederick Waugh (1861-1940). In the early 1930s, Welling's grandfather shot black-and-white reversal footage of the Atlantic Ocean in Ogunquit, Maine, at the suggestion of Waugh. He used the footage to create oil painting which, in turn, is the basis for James Welling's Seascape.
As a collaborative work between the artist, his grandfather, and his brother, who created the sound, Seascape extends Welling's interest in incorporating autobiographical elements into his work.
Presenting photographs from the artist's Wyeth series, Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs included works created specifically for the exhibition.
Welling's engagement with particular places and histories is integral to his practice. The American artist Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) has been a formative influence on Welling's work since childhood. Welling stated, "I realized I had never stopped thinking about Wyeth. He had become a part of how I see." He began to study Wyeth again in the mid-2000s, traveling to Maine and Pennsylvania in search of some of the painter's former locations and subjects. In 2010, Welling initiated a series of color photographs inspired by his research, and 50 debuted in this show.
The photographs were shot on location in places where Wyeth painted throughout his life. The Kuerner Farm, a source of inspiration for Wyeth's work for over 70 years, is now part of Brandywine River Museum of Art. Welling also created site-specific installations on the grounds and in the historic properties attached to the museum. Entitled Gradients, these sculptures extended the project of Things Beyond Resemblance to the physical landscape that influenced both Welling and Wyeth.
The accompanying publication includes an interview with Welling by the curator Philipp Kaiser, and essays by Michael Fried, Suzanne Hudson, and Sharon Lockhart.
Published by Prestel
Read more: Welling in conversation with Alex Greenberger for ARTnews about the Wyeth series
In 2014, James Welling was the recipient of the International Center of Photography’s (ICP) Infinity Award for Art.
Since 1985, the ICP Infinity Awards have recognized major contributions and emerging talent in the fields of photojournalism, art, fashion photography, and publishing. All proceeds from the Infinity Awards benefit ICP’s exhibition, education, community, and public programs.