Videos on Saturday Night Live, endless photographs of beloved Weimaraners, and a trove of iconic paintings; William Wegman ticks all the right boxes. Now the Lower East Side's Sperone Westwater Gallery is showcasing his latest endeavors: factoring and drawing on the imagery of vintage postcards, a personal love of his. 'William Wegman: Postcard Paintings' features some 25 works, all with actual postcards as a signature motif, tucked into his oil paintings on wood panels.
'What’s new is exploring believable yet illusory interior spaces,' says Wegman, referring to 2013's The Great Indoors, a technicolour work that spans an astonishing 16 feet.
In reinventing surrealism for that particular panorama, Wegman takes his cue from a Kew Gardens postcard. ‘While including that postcard and others, I expanded the image so there is a perception of peering out windows and taking in veritable landscapes,' says the artist, speaking from the Chelsea studio where he holds a cache of some 8,000 postcards.
The painting is a visual tour de force – a single red chair peeking out from the shifting planes of color, with a palette running from luminous greens to a lurid orange.
Nearby is 2014's Summer Show, in which Wegman conjures up his notion of an art gallery. 'As a starting off point, I included postcards of colonial portraits from the New York Historical Society,' he points out. Among those is one of former first lady Dolley Madison.
'They’re really an immersive experience so you step into a room with a startling perspective,' says gallerist Angela Westwater. 'These paintings command wallpower in new and perceptive ways.'
’What’s new is exploring believable yet illusory interior spaces,’ says Wegman, referring to 2013’s The Great Indoors, a technicolour work that spans an astonishing 16 feet (pictured left)
The show factors and draws on the imagery of vintage postcards, of which Wegman has a cache of around 8,000 at his Chelsea studio
’They’re really an immersive experience so you step into a room with a startling perspective,’ says gallerist Angela Westwater of the collected works. ’These paintings command wallpower in new and perceptive ways’
INFORMATION
‘William Wegman: Postcard Paintings’ is on view until 23 April. For more information, visit the Sperone Westwater Gallery’s website
Photography courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
ADDRESS
Sperone Westwater
257 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
-
Audi launches AUDI, a China-only sub-brand, with a handsome new EV conceptThe AUDI E previews a new range of China-specific electric vehicles from the German carmaker’s new local sub-brand
-
Inside Izza Marrakech: A new riad where art and bohemian luxury meetHonouring the late Bill Willis’ hedonistic style, Izza Marrakech fuses traditional Moroccan craftsmanship with the best of contemporary art
-
Clocking on: the bedside analogue timepieces that won’t alarm your aestheticWe track down the only tick-tocks that matter, nine traditional alarm clocks that tell the time with minimum fuss and maximum visual impact
-
William Wegman gifts his entire short video catalogue to the Met -
Witty and wonderful, William Wegman’s unseen Polaroids are instant classics -
Canine design: William Wegman surveys his shots of new and used furniture in LA -
Canine connection: William Wegman’s Dogs in Coats is travelling to Max Mara boutiques across the US -
William Wegman: a profileA video art pioneer and conceptual photographer, we retrace Guest Editor William Wegman's career and celebrate his four-legged sitters
