James Welling
In Search of...

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Images(2)

Artist James Welling (American, born 1951)American, born 1951

CultureAmerican

Titles

In Search of...
from the series Drapes

Date1981, printed 2006

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 18 x 14 in. (45.7 x 35.6 cm)
Sheet: 25 7/8 × 19 15/16 in. (65.8 × 50.7 cm)

Credit LineGift of Morris Weiner

Object number2016.43

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionJames Welling studied with conceptual artist John Baldessari at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s and emerged as one of the leading figures of the “Pictures Generation,” a group of artists who deal with questions of representation, perception, and the self-reflexivity of images in the media-saturated, consumer-culture era in which they came of age. In his early Drapes series, Welling brought a newly found interest in the seductive materiality of traditional photography to the task of communicating emotional content with nearly abstract means. He photographed flakes of phyllo dough scattered on draped folds of dark velvet in a straightforward manner, but the resulting images conjure up the sublime, an effect reinforced by their titles, Agony, Island, The Waterfall, Wreckage, or here, In Search of . . . In that sense, these pictures are part of Welling’s longtime investigation into the nature of photographic representation.
ProvenanceThe artist; [David Zwirner Gallery, New York]; Morris Weiner, Houston; given to MFAH, 2016.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Inscribed in graphite on secondary support: In Search of... 1981 (lower center), 4/5 (lower right)

Artist's signature in graphite on lower left corner of secondary support

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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