Opening Friday, January 20, 2012, Wako Works of Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs by James Welling from a project titled WYETH. This will be the artist’s seventh solo show at the gallery.

James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951. He studied sculpture at Carnegie Mellon University and later graduated from California Institute of the Arts, where he worked mainly with video. He relocated to New York in 1978, where he started his photographic projects, and again to California in 1995. Today, his subject matters and methods are wide-ranging from documentary subjects stemming from his personal interests and history (his great-great-grandmother’s diary, lace factories, landscapes of Connecticut, architectural structures) to everyday objects such as aluminum, drapery, gelatin, flowers that have been arranged abstract. Employing both analog and digital methods, he pursues the photographic medium in its entirety.

This exhibition will include Welling’s new project capturing the landscapes of Cushing, Maine and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania that surrounded the home and studio of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and were much of the subject matter of the American realist painter’s works. Welling, an ardent fan of Wyeth particularly in his formative years, visited the two northeastern towns to photograph what remained of the painter’s environs.

When you go to Wyeth’s places, an unsettling phenomenon occurs. You see the paintings before you in pieces, fragmented, with more things Wyeth removed and reordered in painting. But the place is distinct and still the same place in the painting.
Welling’s photographs convey precisely the distance and the closeness revealed through this phenomenon that occurs in the lapse of time and location.

A new catalogue, Wyeth, will be published in conjunction with this exhibition.

» Press Release(PDF)

James Welling has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US, such as the Whitney Biennial in 2008 and The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. His work is in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Welling is currently based in Los Angeles, and is the head of the Photography Area in the Department of Art at UCLA.