4776, 2015, Inkjet print, 106.7 x 160 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner — *4776*, 2015, Inkjet print, 106.7 x 160 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Text by Lara Southern

Copy Editor: George Russell

Metamorphosis, the new retrospective of American photographer James Welling’s forty-year career, celebrates the innovative artist’s stylistic evolution and charts his ground-breaking experimentation with color and abstraction in photography. The show, Welling’s first solo exhibition in Greater China, spans two floors of the David Zwirner Gallery in Hong Kong, and showcases works from the artist’s most celebrated bodies of work, including Aluminum Foil (1980–1981), Flowers (2004-2017), and Chemical (2010-) among others.

From his earliest works produced in the ‘80s, Welling quickly established himself as an artist uninterested in remaining within the traditional constructs of the photographic medium. While his close-up black and white photographs of crumpled aluminum foil appear, at first glance, as mere abstract explorations of texture and composition, upon further investigation unfurl into whimsical worlds entirely their own—verdant landscapes, celestial bodies, or even vast oceans.

009, 2017, Chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 121.9 x 94 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner — *009*, 2017, Chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 121.9 x 94 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Flowers, a series of camera-less photographs (or photograms), marks the artist’s first foray into color play. It is in these images, which become increasingly saturated and psychedelic over time, that one can track the evolution of his approach to a single subject over the course of a decade—his early images, produced by layering brightly colored gels over black and white negatives of flowers, are markedly less vibrant than those he created toward the end of series, using various Photoshop color channels to heighten the whimsical, abstract quality of his photographs.

Lavender Mist, 2014, Inkjet print, 85.5 x 128.3 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner — *Lavender Mist,* 2014, Inkjet print, 85.5 x 128.3 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Some of Welling’s most recognizable pieces in the exhibition hail from his project Glass House (2006-2010), which depicts the iconic 1949 Connecticut home of architect Phillip Johnson. In this collection, the artist continues his investigation into color, albeit in a slightly more analog manner—physically holding up colored filters in front of the camera lens, rather than layering them on digitally after the fact. The resulting series captures the house from all angles, in all seasons, bathed in warm ambers and startling aquas, again highlighting Welling’s alacrity in demonstrating the variability of a single subject through technical manipulation.

Sculpture of a Man, 2019, UV-curable ink on Dibond aluminum, 128.3 x 85.4 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner — *Sculpture of a Man*, 2019, UV-curable ink on Dibond aluminum, 128.3 x 85.4 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

In the images from his collection Choreograph (2014-2020) and his most recent series, Cento, Welling expands upon his skills in color modification with a focus on figuration, prioritizing, for the first time in his photographic practice, the human figure over landscape and architecture. In his pieces from Choreograph, Welling, who studied dance in his younger years, constructs a “digital collage” of photographs of dance rehearsals layered over one another several deep, the bodies merging, responding, competing. While his pieces in Cento also celebrate the human form, in these, the artist layered oil paints over images of Greek sculptures, folding ancient techniques and subject matter into an entirely new artistic process.

3693, 2017, Inkjet print on rag paper, 106.7 x 160 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner — *3693*, 2017, Inkjet print on rag paper, 106.7 x 160 cm © James Welling, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

The task of showcasing such seminal works from a career that spans not merely decades but myriad mediums and techniques is a daunting one. Yet, while the vastness and diversity of Welling’s works might make for a disparate or disjointed retrospective, this carefully curated retrospective highlights the extraordinary evolution—the metamorphosis, if you will —of one boundary-breaking artist’s ongoing examination of abstraction, color, and the photographic process.