James Welling: Pathological Color
“I decided to peel apart the layers of the three-color processes that determine how our eyes—and all photographic media—register color. My aim was to show seeing.”
James Welling has spent more than a decade deconstructing—and reconstructing—color. His body of work acts as an evolving, dynamic archive that reconsiders the history and technical capacity of the photographic medium.
The artist carefully creates multi-layered images of subjects including contemporary dance, landscape, and architecture to explore trichromatic vision—the psychological perception of color through red, green, or blue sensors in the eye.
Continuing to investigate color phenomena in his multi-channel inkjet prints, Welling has adapted Goethe’s suggestive concept of “pathological color.”
He worked with the gallery to create this online exhibition on the occasion of his solo presentation at ADAA: The Art Show. The works presented here bring together a selection that expands on the series on view at the fair.
Image: James Welling, Morgan Great Hall, 2015 (detail)
Panelist Event
TIME named Wolfgang Tillmans to the 2023 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tony-nominated playwright Jeremy O. Harris was invited to write about the artist, stating “[...] Tillmans has the unique ability to take his viewer through histories and timelines both real and imagined, as seen in his recent traveling retrospective, To Look Without Fear.
Read a new poem from the artist, on the occasion of her solo exhibition in New York, I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers.