
‘I decided to peel apart the layers of the three-color processes that determine how our eyes—and all photographic media—register colour. My aim was to show seeing.’
James Welling has spent more than a decade deconstructing—and reconstructing—colour. His body of work acts as an evolving, dynamic archive that reconsiders the history and technical capacity of the photographic medium.
The artist carefully creates multi-layered images of subjects including contemporary dance, landscape, and architecture to explore trichromatic vision—the psychological perception of color through red, green, or blue sensors in the eye.
Continuing to investigate colour phenomena in his multi-channel inkjet prints, Welling has adapted Goethe’s suggestive concept of ‘pathological colour.’
He worked with the gallery to create this online exhibition on the occasion of his solo presentation at ADAA: The Art Show. The works presented here bring together a selection that expands on the series on view at the fair.
James Welling has been questioning the norms of representation since the 1970s. His work centers on an exploration of photography, shuffling the elemental components of the medium to produce a distinctly uncompromising body of work. Welling is also intensely interested in cultural and personal ideas of memory in his work. In opening up the medium of photography for experimentation, James Welling’s practice has influenced an entire generation of artists and photographers.





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