WILLIAM WEGMAN
New Photographs
February 16 – April 8, 2006
Reception: Thurs., February 16, 6-8 p.m.
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographs and video works by William Wegman, which coincides with the opening of the artist’s comprehensive traveling exhibition, William Wegman-Funney/Strange at the Brooklyn Museum on March 10, 2006. This career retrospective was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA and will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC and the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL.
Wegman’s exhibition at Senior & Shopmaker includes new, large-scale pigment prints of the artist’s now famous Weimaraner dogs, as well as selected early videos in a newly released DVD compilation. The new photographs range in complexity from single images to multi-panel pictures. Like all of Wegman’s photographs, the compositions are tightly structured, with extraordinary care given to the pose and lighting of his subject. Included in the exhibition are four horizontal “flags”: new compositions in which the dog’s profile and its mirror reflection are seen against bifurcated color backgrounds. Color and reflection are the dominant features of this new body of work, against which the dog’s elegant physiognomy verges on abstraction.
The artist readily admits that once his muse, Fay Ray, gave birth to eight puppies in 1989, several baby Weimaraners multiplied pictorial possibilities exponentially, leading to a myriad of new directions from formal experiments to narrative tableaux: “Up close, standing, sitting, or lying naked before the eye of the big camera, all body parts become landscape, a forest of trees, a topography of hills and valleys, earth and boulders in a shoreline of endless connectivity. Bodies overlap, collide, recline, extend, and appear as shadows, reflections, negative shapes”.
William Wegman, an important presence in the art world for thirty years, has achieved a remarkable breadth of audience, from museum curator to dog lover to children around the world. First known for his conceptual photography and video works made in the 1970s, Wegman is a master of many mediums, chief among them painting, drawing, and photography.
Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm, and Saturday, 11am-6pm. For further information, contact Betsy Senior or Laurence Shopmaker.