Maureen Paley is pleased to present James Welling’s third solo show at the gallery. The exhibition will include new photographs from Wyeth, for which Welling travelled to Maine and Pennsylvania in pursuit of subjects and places painted by American realist painter Andrew Wyeth (1917 – 2009).

Although the project started in 2010, its origins date back to Welling’s early years as an artist, when Wyeth was a major source of inspiration. In the Wyeth project, Welling is equally interested in the biographical significance of Wyeth’s subject matter and in tracing the origins of how he came to photography. As he noted in a 2012 interview with Patricia Hickson, Emily Hall Tremaine Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Wyeth project permitted him to uncover pictorial devices he had unconsciously adopted from the painter. The work inspired him “to look very closely at things, to be intense, to be very focused.” Wyeth, in turn, goes beyond the straightforward question of influence, to engage with the complex relationship between the photographic image and its referent.

While several of Welling’s photographs are based directly on Wyeth’s tempera or watercolor paintings, other images depart from a visual resemblance to the painter’s work and depict his studio and the environs where he lived and painted. Determining what was, and what was not, a Wyeth subject became a multi-layered project. Broader issues of temporality, aging, and creative renewal are evoked, while the photographs simultaneously trace Wyeth’s oeuvre and open up a hitherto unexplored aspect of Welling’s artistic practice.

Along with the Wyeth project, there will be a video projection of a recently restored 10 minute Super 8 film made by Welling in January 1971.

James Welling (b. 1951, Hartford, Connecticut) received his B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Emerging in the late 1970s, Welling came to be known as an artist for whom photographic norms and the representational field itself were (and remain) not a given, but rather a field of contest between different formal languages.

Welling’s work has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and North America. A major survey, titled James Welling: Monograph, was recently held at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio and accompanied by a substantial catalogue published by Aperture. The exhibition will travel to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, opening September 2013. James Welling: The Mind on Fire will be on view in November 2013 at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. The show explores the origin and development of Welling’s abstract photographs from the 1980s and was previously at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, England and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Also opening in November 2013 will be a comprehensive overview at the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland.

Welling’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts (2013); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2010); Horticultural Society of New York (2007); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (both 2002); Sprengel Museum Hannover (1999); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (both 1998). In 2000, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio organized a major survey of his work, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In 2009, Welling’s work was featured in the critically acclaimed historical survey, The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in 2008, he participated in the Whitney Biennial. In 1992, his work was included in documenta IX.

Welling is Area Head of Photography at UCLA and in the Fall of 2012 was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University. His work is held in major museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles.