James Welling is an American artist based in Los Angeles whose diverse body of work has influenced a generation of artists and photographers. Making both representational and abstract images, Welling brings an experimental sensibility to photography. Even the simplest of subjects, whether it be aluminum foil or Jell-O cubes, are crafted into an intricate display of sensory and imagination.

In 2006, Welling began taking photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The result was scores of intensely colorful digital ink-jet prints. In an effort to explore the way in which the human brain processes color, Jim makes multiple exposures using colored filters, clear glass, and fogged plastic to create a vibrant and textural photographic experience. Additionally, he uses diffraction filters in order to break the light into spectrums so that he can photograph what our eyes cannot see on their own.

His work has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the Cincinnati Art Museum which traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. His work was exhibited in documenta IX, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 2014, What Is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography. His work is in the collections of major museums such as Centre Georges Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. His books include The Mind on Fire (2014), Monograph (2013), Glass House (2010), and Flowers (2007). Welling teaches in the art department at UCLA and was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2012. He is represented by David Zwirner, New York/London, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Peter Freeman, Paris.