Regen Projects is pleased to present Iconographia, James Welling’s eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

For Iconographia Welling’s camera becomes a time machine, reanimating images of Greek and Roman busts. The exhibition debuts these Personae, as well as a selection of images from his Cento series. Welling has used the camera as a vehicle to “time travel” in previous bodies of work such as Diary/Landscape, Seascape, Wyeth, Buildings by H. H. Richardson, Glass House, and Maison de Verre, but rarely with the emotional intensity of this latest exhibition. The exhibition’s title, Iconographia, refers to a seventeenth-century portfolio of intaglio portraits made by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck.

In the artist’s own words:

“While making Cento, my ongoing series of photographs of sculptures and artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean region, I discovered the celebrated Korai sculptures in Athens. I reanimated one, Kore 674, by inserting green eyes, borrowed from an Édouard Manet painting, into her stone face and by coloring her hair bright red. This first head became the template for the process wherein I made Personae. I source eyes, jewelry, and clothing from old master paintings and then do the hair and make-up as I wish. The individuals depicted in Personae are primarily Roman with a few persons from ancient Greece, Egypt, Syria, and North Africa.”