The Philip Johnson Glass House, in association with David Zwirner, is pleased to announce a new installation featuring works by artist James Welling. The exhibition, mounted in The Four Seasons Restaurant Lobby Gallery at 99 East 52nd Street in New York, features ten limited edition prints from Welling’s Glass House series. This series has been previously shown at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Vienna; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York and Maureen Paley, London and is the subject of a publication entitled James Welling: Glass House (April 2011, Damiani Editore).
The photographs, priced at $2,500 and $18,000, are offered for sale through January 2, 2012. A portion of sales benefit The Glass House general operations, education programs and preservation of the site, including fourteen buildings and structures, a collection of contemporary art and sculpture, and the 47-acre landscape. For more information, visit www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org.
James Welling, a Connecticut native, first photographed The Philip Johnson Glass House for a piece that appeared in New York Magazine. Between 2006 and 2009, Welling visited the site several times to capture The Glass House and the surrounding buildings. The photographs were taken with a digital camera and the resulting images capture the architectural features of Johnson’s 47-acre compound.
In addition to The Glass House, Welling photographed the Brick House (1949), the Lake Pavilion (1962), and the Lincoln Kirstein Tower (1985) on the grounds of the estate. To achieve his luminous effects, the artist placed a variety of colored filters between lens and subject to introduce intense fields of color, transforming the image at the moment of exposure.
Welling describes the experience in this manner: “Although the Glass House is symmetrical (the front is the same as the back), I prefer a frontal view because you can see through the house to the landscape directly west. This is the aspect of the house that is perhaps most fascinating to me. This big glass box, plunked down in the Connecticut landscape, seems like a conceptual sculpture, a gigantic lens in the landscape. When I realized I could make the glass red or add reflections to the face of this supposedly transparent house, my project became a laboratory for ideas about transparency, reflectivity, and color.”
“James Welling’s poetic photographs, which turn the famously translucent simplicity of the Glass House into luscious dreamscapes, epitomize our mission of using the site as a catalyst for inspiration and experimentation, honoring the creative legacies of Philip Johnson and David Whitney,” states Rena Zurofsky, Glass House interim executive director. “We are grateful to both James Welling and David Zwirner for their generosity,” she continued.
The book, James Welling: Glass House, chronicles his series of work and is introduced by art historian Noam M. Elcott and includes an interview with the artist by architectural historian Sylvia Lavin. Published in April 2011 by Damiani Editore, the publication (hardback, 13 x 10 in. / 112 pgs / 45 color) is sold in The Philip Johnson Glass House Design Store and can be purchased in-store ($50) or online ($60 domestic shipping and handling included).
