James Welling

Hugely influential among contemporary art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for more than 35 years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. "James Welling: Monograph" provides the most thorough presentation of the artist's work to date. Since the mid-1970s, Welling's work has explored realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogues addressing his more than 25 bodies of work. Yet no previous book has attempted to link these works and examine the primary threads that run through them all. Sumptuously produced, this volume presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, interspersed with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. James Crump, Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.
James Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. An earlier survey exhibition, "James Welling: Photographs, 1974-1999," originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Solo exhibition venues include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Galerie Nchst St. Stephan, Vienna. Welling is professor in the UCLA Department of Art, where he has taught for more than 15 years, and a visiting professor at Princeton University.