APRIL 20, 2020

Photograph: David Zwirner website

“I decided to peel apart the layers of the three-color processes that determine how our eyes—and all photographic media—register color. My aim was to show seeing.” James Welling has spent more than a decade deconstructing—and reconstructing—color. His body of work acts as an evolving, dynamic archive that reconsiders the history and technical capacity of the photographic medium.

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The artist carefully creates multi-layered images of subjects including contemporary dance, landscape, and architecture to explore trichromatic vision—the psychological perception of color through red, green, or blue sensors in the eye. Continuing to investigate color phenomena in his multi-channel inkjet prints, Welling has adapted Goethe’s suggestive concept of “pathological color.”

He worked with the gallery to create this online exhibition on the occasion of his solo presentation at ADAA: The Art Show. The works presented here bring together a selection that expands on the series that was exhibited at the fair.

In Kusama (2014), part of a group of photographs centered around MoMA’s sculpture garden, Welling’s digital images are layered above and beneath an archival photo of a Yayoi Kusama performance in the same space in 1965.

Photograph: David Zwirner website

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In the 1970s, Richard Avedon captured the essence of psychedelia by employing the color techniques of the era—tactics that Welling adapts digitally in some of his own works. “I realized that I could recreate some of those techniques that Avedon had used for The Beatles by taking the same file and placing an equal density object or gradient map in between the two files that would color parts of the image,” Welling explains. In Welling's work, there is more than one surface.

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​Photograph: David Zwirner website

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In his Choreograph works, for example, photographs of dancers are superimposed with architectural and landscape images, including a Breuer building in Florida, sculptures by Tony Smith, and landscapes in Connecticut and Switzerland.

Online Viewing Room