Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present William Wegman: Private Show, an exhibition bringing together rare vintage photographs and video from the 1970s with later works that expand upon the visual strategies developed during the artist's formative years.

After relocating to Southern California in 1970, Wegman became part of a generation of artists rethinking the role of photography, language, performance, and everyday experience within contemporary art. Working in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, alongside contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg, he developed a photographic practice that grew directly out of his early performances and videos. The resulting black-and-white photographs are playful and experimental, challenging the viewer's assumptions about perception and the image itself.

In A Basic Guide to Lettering (1972), for example, the familiar format of an instructional guide is both literally and figuratively turned upside down in an exercise of conceptual play, while Private Show (1972) stages an intimate performance before an audience of one man and his dog. Photographed from behind its seated spectators, the work turns the act of viewing into its central subject, blurring the roles of performer, audience, and observer. Other photographs employ multiple exposures, superimposed images, and inventive darkroom techniques to create visual illusions that anticipate the digital manipulation of images decades later.

Also included in the exhibition is Wegman's landmark video Singing Stomach (1970), one of the artist's earliest explorations of performance and one of the first examples of the use video in contemporary art. By flexing his abdominal muscles and shifting his posture, Wegman transforms his belly button and natural skin folds into the illusion of a face, animating it with his own voice to create the uncanny impression that his stomach is singing. Like the photographs of this period, the video demonstrates how simple actions and careful framing can produce unexpectedly complex visual effects.

The exhibition places the work of the 1970s in dialogue with a selection of photographs from the 1990s and early 2000s featuring Wegman's Weimaraners. Working with the large-format Polaroid camera, Wegman expanded the scale of his photographs while maintaining the economy and visual wit that had long defined his practice. In Eye On, the placement of a single cutout eye recasts a canine portrait into a humorous and disquieting image, revealing the artist's enduring fascination with illusion, transformation, and the expressive potential of the photographic image.

Spanning more than three decades, Private Show follows the evolution of Wegman's photographic practice from its earliest experiments to its mature expression. Together, these works reveal an artist who continually finds new possibilities within the medium, transforming photography into a space where observation, performance, and conceptual trickery converge.

William Wegman was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943. He received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at institutions including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and many other important public institutions.