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David Zwirner is pleased to present work by American photographer James Welling (b. 1951), on view across two floors of the gallery’s Hong Kong location—the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in greater China. The exhibition will provide an overview of Welling’s career, spanning from the 1980s to the present, and will highlight the persistent tension in his photographs between abstraction and figuration, as well as his decades-long investigation of color phenomena. Viewed together, his body of work acts as a dynamic archive that reconsiders the history and technical capacity of the photographic medium.

Since the early 1970s, when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, Welling has fashioned an evolving body of work that considers both the history and material specificities of photography. Emerging at a time when photography focused on its capacity for mimesis, Welling’s work signaled a break with traditional ideas of the medium by shifting attention to the construction of images themselves. While the artist produces discrete series whose subject matter ranges widely, his work is united by an examination of what might be termed “states of being” produced by photographically derived images and how such states are, in turn, read by the viewer.
 

On view in the exhibition will be photographs from Aluminum Foil (1980–1981), Flowers (2004–2017), Glass House (2006–2010), Chemical (2010–), Choreograph (2014–2020), Bodies (2018–), and Cento (2019–).

Image: James Welling, 4776, 2015 (detail)