James Welling
New York, NY
JAMES WELLING
Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951, James Welling grew up in nearby Simsbury. Exposed to art and its study from a young age, he attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania until he transferred to California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1971. At CalArts he earned both a BA and an MFA. During his time there, he studied with John Baldessari and was part of a community of artists that became one of the groups that made up the Pictures Generation. This movement included artists who were interested in representational imagery, explored in part through framing and staging, hallmarks of Welling's work.
Welling is self-taught in the rudiments of developing and printing photography and went on to head the photography division of the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles in 1995 and now teaches at Princeton University. His work is widely exhibited and included in part in the permanent collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photograph, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York. For his profile, his exhibition Choreograph at Regen Projects was filmed in 2016.
James Welling - 11:22
“I am not sure there is an overarching theme in my photography. One of the things I have discovered is you can look at certain elements of photography- portraits, landscape architecture, abstract photographs, large prints, small prints and each one of these modalities has a kind of fundamental or foundational element, but they don’t necessarily carry one to the next project. I have been working on color now for ten years, so I am very interested in problems around color. ”
“For me beauty is just a lot of complicated things in balance for a short period of time. Anything can be beautiful. It’s just finding the right angle.”
“I still have these kind of romantic or maybe less than complete ideas about the medium so it’s something that’s always evolving for me.”
