Untitled

James Welling American
1981
Not on view
Dispersing flakes of dried phyllo dough on a flat black piece of fabric, Welling confounds distinctions between abstraction and representation, endlessly attenuating the viewer’s desire for a recognizable referent. While most of the phyllo-dough photographs are vertical compositions, close up and in black and white, this unique print is one of four horizontals made of the entire construction and in color (the other three are in a fiery red). An avid reader of Romantic and Symbolist poetry, Welling manages in photography a simultaneously sensuous and austere, theatrical and self-referential, landscape of the imagination that would not have displeased Baudelaire or Mallarmé.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Untitled
  • Artist: James Welling (American, born 1951)
  • Date: 1981
  • Medium: Chromogenic print
  • Dimensions: Image: 26.7 x 34.3 cm (10 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.)
    Frame: 41.3 x 48.9 cm (16 1/4 x 19 1/4 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2010
  • Object Number: 2010.442
  • Rights and Reproduction: © James Welling
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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