Last week, when I spoke to James Welling at David Zwirner, the gallery was de-installing its De Wain Valentine show. Whirring drills threatened to upstage the soft-spoken photographer, who discussed his show at The Brandywine River Museum of Art, Things Beyond Resemblance. He looked down as we spoke, his moss-colored glasses and wavy gray hair pointed toward a table between us, so he barely noticed when two men walked by, carrying a six-foot-tall Yayoi Kusama painting.
As Welling sipped a coffee, we discussed his series of photographs based on paintings by Andrew Wyeth, who Welling considers his first and greatest influence. For five years, Welling has photographed objects and places around the American modernist's studio. Though the photographs have been exhibited before, "Things Beyond Resemblance" is the most complete show of the "Wyeth" works. It also features Welling's first sculptures in decades–"Gradients," a series of blurry color strips that dot the Brandywine's 200-acre campus.
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