Untitled

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

Overview

Provenance

Exhibition History

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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Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, Thomas Struth German, Chromogenic print — Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples
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1988

012 (from the series "Flowers"), James Welling American, Chromogenic print — 012 (from the series "Flowers")
James Welling
2006

Necklace, Meta Overbeck American, Gold, emeralds, Montana sapphires, topazes, enamel, American — Necklace
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Louis C. Tiffany
Manufacturer Tiffany & Co.
ca. 1914–15

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