| | | |  | | | James Welling
0775 (from the series Glass House, 2006–14), 2006
© James Welling, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | Metamorphosis | | | | 5 May – 16 July, 2017 | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | James Welling
Meridian 0808 (from the series Meridian, 2014), 2014
© James Welling, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles | | | | | | James Welling (born in 1951, Hartford, Connecticut) is one of photography’s most influential pioneering artists worldwide. For more than forty years, Welling has been exploring the foundations of the medium, drawing from it the broad range of conceptual, aesthetic and technological options without restricting himself to a specific imagery or production form. His works oscillate between analogue and digital, colour and black-and-white, camera-less and camera-based processes, dark-room alchemy and high-end digital print.
By presenting Welling’s series of photographs, video, and sculpture from the 1970s to the present, this first Austrian retrospective demonstrates how his work crosses the gaps between different media, as it does between documentation and abstraction, image and reality, concept and emotion, present and past.
Influenced by American Realist painters such as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth Welling first studied painting from 1969 to 1971 and a year of modern dance in in Pittsburgh; then he attended John Baldessari’s Post Studio Art class at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Motivated by his interest in the representatives of straight photography Paul Strand and Walker Evans and the avant-gard photographer László Moholy-Nagy and after his art studies in 1974 Welling – self-taught – took up photography. | | | | | |  | | | James Welling
Hands #3 (from the series Hands, 1974–75), 1975
© James Welling, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | Welling has since developed an approach shaped by experiment and radical stylistic diversity that evolves along the border of photography and painting, film, architecture, sculpture, and dance. Painting and its history always remained central within his work – in the form of its loss, or, to put it more neutrally, its absence. At the same time his oeuvre raises issues from the debates in the early 1980s taking up concepts of authorship, originality, and representation and also reflects the fundamental transformation of photography affected by therepercussions of digitalization and the omnipresence of electronic media. His cross-border approach adapts or renews various opposing ideas, stylistic traditions, and genres. As a result he is able to connect a form of postmodernism inclined toward an analytical review of visual media and the attitude toward modernism as emphasizing the autonomy of the artist and medium; he also convincingly marries the American West Coast’s colourful, image-enamored culture and the cool conceptualism embodied by New York. After two decades teaching as Professor at the Department of Arts at the CalArts in Lose Angeles, since 2015 Welling has lived in New York once more, where his artistic career began, and where he today teaches as Visiting Professor of Photography at Princeton University.
Welling’s permanent reshaping and renewing of the basis of his oeuvre correlates with the potential for change inherent to photography. The exhibition addresses the relational dimensions of Welling’s oeuvre, the ways in which each new series is based on existing work through the artist’s ongoing exploration of his own visual production and its spheres of influence. Interweaving personal and cultural memory with the history of painting and photography, a specific poetic melancholy emerges in his work. Via the concept of ventriloquism, Welling has reshaped the permanent "haunting" of his photographic process through diverse "voices": "When I discovered photography, I realized that it was the perfect ventriloquist’s medium. I could throw my voice into different sorts of pictures: I could speak in many different formal languages."
The exhibition is a cooperation between S.M.A.K., Ghent, and Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien. | | | | | |  | | | James Welling
0123 (from the series Choreograph, 2014–17), 2015
© James Welling, courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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