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.