FAIRFIELD, CONN.- Fairfield University Art Museum is presenting James Welling: Cento, a major exhibition of the photographer’s work focusing on the classical world, in its first American museum presentation. The exhibition will be on view from Sept. 25 to Dec. 12, in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts.
James Welling: Cento presents more than 60 photographs by Connecticut-born, American photographer James Welling (b. 1951), featuring architecture and statuary of ancient Greece and Rome. Welling prints his images on plastic sheets via a laser printer, and then animates the surface with oil paint, oil sticks, and even raw powdered pigment. The resulting prints lie somewhere between photography, painting, and printmaking, their surfaces mechanically printed while also visibly hand-altered.
The series Cento takes its name from an ancient type of “found” poem, created by assembling fragments of various poetic or musical works. In these works, created between 2019 and 2021, Welling captures photographic segments of ancient sculpture and architecture, overlaid with intense colors that ask the viewer to consider concepts of polychromy–both the true ancient colors, often lost to our eyes today, as well as modern color applied to ancient remains.
The exhibition also includes works from the series Personae (2021-22) in which Welling explores human expressiveness. This series began with photographs of ancient portrait busts, to which the artist added eyes captured from Old Master paintings. The process, the artist notes, is his way of “reanimating” the men and women of the ancient world “so that they may live anew in the present moment.” Museum Director Carey Weber said, “I think people will find these photographs fascinating on many levels. They are aesthetically beautiful but disorienting at times. We are so pleased to be able to share these works with our Museum patrons this fall.”
The Walsh Gallery also hosts a selection of 10 historic plaster casts, chosen by Welling from Fairfield University Art Museum’s collection of over 100 such casts to complement his uniquely transformative works.
James Welling studied Fine Art at Carnegie-Mellon University and Modern Dance at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Welling is considered a member of the “Picture Generation,” hailed for their innovative approach to photography in the 1970s and 80s. Interested primarily in the unpredictable character of photography, Welling deliberately explores themes engaging with materiality, abstraction, color, and spatiality. He has been represented by David Zwirner since 2005 and has had nine shows with the gallery. His work is held in numerous major museum collections. He lives and works in New York City.
Recent solo exhibitions of Welling’s work have taken place at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Two major exhibitions, in 2012 and 2013, offered an overview of his work as a whole: Monograph, organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and The Mind on Fire, held at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, England, at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporana in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada.
An illustrated exhibition catalogue will be available in the galleries. A robust selection of free programming has been created to complement the exhibition, including an opening night talk with the artist, a day-long symposium focusing on photography and the ancient world, a workshop on anatomical drawing, family art-making events, and more.
