James Welling: Metamorphosis

Publisher: S.M.A.K. / Prestel

Publication Date: 2017

Foreword by Ingried Brugger and Philippe Van Cauteren. Edited with texts by Heike Eipeldauer and Martin Germann. Conversation with the artist by Hal Foster

Marking the influential photographer’s first major European survey, this book features highlights from four decades of James Welling’s oeuvre.

Emerging out of the “Picture Generation”—a group of artists focused on a critique of photographic media—James Welling has gone on to experiment successfully in nearly every photographic genre. This monograph, designed by Joseph Logan in close collaboration with the artist, presents a selection of works from the early 1970s to today, demonstrating the artist’s conceptual foundations. Welling’s series are dialogues between image and matter, process and result, representation and abstraction. This volume includes, amongst other series, selections from Diary/Landscape, in which Welling matched the writing of his ancestors’ letters with Connecticut winter landscapes; Glass House a meditation on Philip Johnson’s 1949 residence, shot using colored filters; Degrades, pure color photograms created in the darkroom; and Wyeth and Choreograph, which track his early interest in painting and dance. The generous and vividly reproduced illustrations are accompanied by an extensive interview with the artist and critical essays that discuss Welling’s work in connection with American painting, post-modernism, and authorship, and the artist’s eloquently emotional photographic language.

Details

Publisher: S.M.A.K. / Prestel

Artist: James Welling

Contributors: Ingried Brugger, Heike Eipeldauer, Hal Foster, Martin Germann

Publication Date: 2017

ISBN: 9783791356037

Retail: $60 | £45

Status: Not Available

Designer: Joseph Logan

Printer: Grafisches Centrum Cuno, Calbe

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in (21.6 x 26 cm)

Pages: 192

Reproductions: 142 color

Artist and Contributors

James Welling

Since the 1970s, 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.

Ingried Brugger

Heike Eipeldauer

Hal Foster

Hal Foster has been a force in American art criticism since the late 1970s, bringing psychoanalytic and poststructural theory to bear on contemporary art and its historical precedents. In 1983 he edited the anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which helped frame postmodernism within the arts. Foster began to write for Artforum in 1978 and was a senior editor at Art in America (1981–1987) before becoming a coeditor of the journal October in 1991, and contributes frequently to Artforum, October, and the London Review of Books. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985), Compulsive Beauty (1993), The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime (2002), The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), The First Pop Age (2012), and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (2015). He is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Martin Germann

Martin Germann is senior curator at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent. From 2008 to 2011, he worked as curator at the kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, and he has organized solo exhibitions and publications with artists such as Michael Borremans, Aaron Curry, Julian Go¨the, Joachim Koester, Elke Krystufek, Michael Sailstorfer, and Larry Sultan.

$26.25

$35