William Wegman is an internationally renowned artist and photographer, whose photographs, videos and paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world. He is best known for his on-going artistic collaborations with his Weimaraners, his lifelong muses.
In 1979, William Wegman was invited by the Polaroid Corporation to work with the recently developed 20 x 24 Polaroid camera. Inspired by this new medium, Wegman made some of his rst colour photographs, continuing his collaboration with his dog Man Ray who had been central to Wegman’s 1970s black and white photographs and video work. Wegman continued to work extensively with the 20 x 24 Polaroid camera until 2007 when Polaroid stopped producing film. In over thirty years of working with this camera, Wegman explored a rich and wide range of themes from abstraction and anthropomorphism to surrealism, cubism and colour theory. Each new dog suggests new ideas and new ways of working. Fay Ray followed Man Ray in 1987 and her children and their children provided a large and on going cast of characters.
Huxley-Parlour Gallery will be exhibiting a select group of unique 20 x 24 Polaroid prints from this important body of work. Dating from the 1980s through to 2001, all works are being exhibited in the United Kingdom for the first time.
William Wegman was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana in 1967. Wegman has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. Wegman’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world. His work was included in such seminal exhibitions as 'When Attitudes Become Form' and 'Documenta V', as well as a retrospective organised by the Kunstmuseum Lucerne in 1990, which travelled to museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork. Recent exhibitions include 'William Wegman and California Conceptualism', at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 'Being Human', which was the central exhibition at Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles this summer and which begins a four-year travelling tour at The National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne this Autumn. The exhibition is accompanied by the new publication 'Being Human', published by Thames and Hudson.
William Wegman lives and works in New York and Maine.