Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present William Wegman: New and Used Furniture, 1972 – 2015. This exhibition traces the artist’s use of furniture as an aesthetic, compositional, and humorous device throughout his storied career, culminating with new work in the current exhibition. Since the 1970’s, Wegman has used props to his advantage, transforming a simple vocabulary of found objects into witty collaborators. Although his best-known collaborators are his now iconic Weimaraner dogs, furniture has played a starring role just as often.
Wegman was a pioneer in the West Coast conceptual movement in Los Angeles in the 70s. Unlike their more austere predecessors on the East Coast (Lewitt, Judd, Flavin), West Coast artists injected their work with the nonsensical, often starting with the premise of a conceptual system only to reveal its inherent absurdity. In the exhibition’s 81 panel work Three to Four, 1971-2, for instance, Wegman proposes a classic conceptual construct of permutations. But instead of working with mathematical abstractions, Wegman takes on the ridiculous task of documenting all the possible combinations of three artists and four activities: reading the newspaper, listening to music, drinking a soda, and sitting in a chair.
In recent works such as Left Right Black White, 2015, Wegman photographs sleek Eames chairs in rythmic black and white compositions, his Weimaraners poised as bookends with contrasting backgrounds. This work recalls earlier images from the exhibition that play with repetition and reversal. In another recent example, Looking Over, 2015, the Weimaraner subject is sculptural and stoic, perched atop a Nakashima wood bench. The mixture of textures – the dog’s velvety fur, the warm wood tones, and the shadows on the backdrop create a lush layered image.
Like his studio chairs, Wegman’s Weimaraners have for years played the role of the everyday element which upends the equation. Almost 40 years of working with his dogs, however, has led Wegman to acknowledge not just their collaborative genius but also to appreciate their emotional weight and beauty. Nowhere is this more evident than in the artist’s recent work with classic examples of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and George Nakashima furniture. Surprised to find that the furniture transcended mere prop-hood and “itself became a character,” Wegman embraced the minimalist ideal of dog and object. The resulting photographs are documents of classical simplicity, which merge performance with a modernist design aesthetic.
William Wegman has exhibited internationally beginning with his first solo exhibitions in 1971 at Galerie Sonnabend, Paris and Pomona College of Art, California. His work was included in such seminal exhibitions as “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” (Bern Kunsthalle, 1969) and was recently included in the Pacific Standard Time exhibition “It Happened at Pomona” in 2012. In addition to his recent solo show at San Jose Museum of Art (Artists Including Me: William Wegman), Wegman has had solo exhibitions at Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, Artipelag, Stockholm and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine, among others. In 2007, a major exhibition, Funney/Strange, traveled to Smithsonian American Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida and The Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio. Wegman’s work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as Carnegie Institute, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recently, work related to this exhibition was featured in Wallpaper* in October 2015. He currently lives and works in New York City and Maine.
