James Welling
°1951, Hartford (US) – lives and works in Los Angeles (US)
James Welling has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, but refers strongly to the history of American painting. At the same time it connects with the critical, post-modern debates that were current in the Pictures Generation scene in the early 1980s, where concepts of authorship, originality and representation were prominent. In addition to this conceptual basis, emotional states such as melancholy and nostalgia are distinctly present in the work of this artist, who often interweaves biographical elements with the history of photography. Welling’s photographic practice is comparable with that of a “ventriloquist”, as he himself once described it, meaning that he embraces many artistic languages through the filter of photography.
Courtesy of S.M.A.K.
James Welling ‘s work has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Kunsthalle, Bern; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Work by the artist has been extensively included in international group exhibitions, including in the critically acclaimed historical survey The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Welling’s work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
James Welling is represented by the following galleries;
click through to discover more of his work.
Gallerie Nächst St. Stephan / Rosemarie Schwarzwäelder, Vienna
David Zwirner, New York / London / …
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris / London
You can also discover more of Welling’s work on his own website.