Catherine Taft on James Welling
Throughout his nearly five-decade-long career, James Welling has produced straightforward photographs of architecture, modern dance, and the artist’s (specifically, Andrew Wyeth’s) studio, in addition to creating studies of texture and light and photograms of floral arrangements, among other things. His is a careful and at times safe sort of experimentation that reconsiders the materiality, spatiality, and chromaticism of his chosen medium via tasteful compositions. Rarely, however, has the artist’s aesthetic tinkering generated such refreshingly unexpected and delightfully odd images as those in “Iconographia,” Welling’s eleventh solo show with Regen Projects. Featured were pieces from the artist’s latest series, “Personae,” 2021–22, in which he took black-and-white images of antique figurative statuary—many scanned from books or pulled from the internet—digitally colored them, superimposed the eyes of people from famous paintings onto them, and then handworked the surfaces of the resulting prints, adding or removing pigment. The earliest of the bunch, Portrait of Kore 674, 2021, for example, began as a scanned picture of a marble maiden from the collection of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Welling used Photoshop to give her eyes from an Édouard Manet painting, digitally colored the image’s background and facial features, printed it, wet it, and then applied a thin veil of black oil paint to the work’s entire surface, a finishing touch that dulled the saturated hues and unified the grounds.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Artforum website.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
