Though he came of age with the Pictures Generation, photographer James Welling has long concerned himself with the formal and expressive properties of photographs as well as their ability to critically comment on our image-saturated world. His interests have included architecture, landscape and the history of modernism, as witnessed in projects such as his recent show at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which focused on the environment of painter Andrew Wyeth. (He also debuted “Gradient” sculptures on the museum’s lush grounds.) This show of 20 new large-scale ink-jet prints sees the artist returning to the subject of dance, which he studied before matriculating at CalArts. The works layer images of dancers from different companies with elements of buildings by architects like Marcel Breuer, as well as open fields. He ran the black-and-white pictures through colored Photoshop filters, creating dazzling photographs that evoke double processing.
Pictured: James Welling: 9485, 2014, ink-jet print, approx. 41¾ by 63¾ inches. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York and London.