Sperone Westwater is pleased to present William Wegman: Writing by Artist, a show of texts, drawings, paintings, early photographs, and videos by the artist dating from the early 1970s to the present, many shown here for the first time. This solo marks Wegman’s seventh at the gallery and coincides with Primary Information’s book of the same name, edited by exhibition curator Andrew Lampert and published in April 2022.
Installed on two floors of the gallery, Writing by Artist offers a wide range of entry points into the artist’s universe. Spanning five decades, the works in this exhibition all hinge conceptually and pictorially on writing and language, including games, puns, and palindromes—incorporating words in one form or another. In some instances, the text is simply a caption or a few handwritten words. In others, prose delightfully unravels in surprising forms—Wegman types absurd non-sequiturs on Princess Cruises stationary, witty annotations are scribbled onto a curator’s essay, and words are deliberately mistranslated, reworked, and fictionalized in graphite and ink on paper. The works are installed in thematic groupings such as architecture/houses, furniture, history, language, perception/multiplicity, relationships, time/calculations, and television/media.
Featured also are the artist’s early photographic works, dating back to the three years he lived in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1973. During this time, Wegman became closely associated with such artists as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom he shared both a sense of irreverence towards conceptual art and, more importantly, a sense of humor. Poking holes in the stuffier, more academic, East Coast version of conceptualism, Wegman and his LA colleagues used paint, drawing, video, and photography in ironic ways, often paired with language, to turn didactic formalism on its head. Turning away from handcrafting objects, Wegman utilized domestic, readymade props and banal subjects close at hand. He sometimes used video to improvise short performances— staged vignettes in which expectations are reversed, and puns and homonyms are pursued to absurd conclusions. In one 1972 photograph, the artist is seen jumping away from a pile of his clothes, scattered nearby on the studio floor. The accompanying type transforms the scene: “For a moment, he forgot where he was and jumped into the ocean.”
William Wegman: Writing by Artist will be on view from 5 May – 29 July 2022. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, 5 May from 5 to 7pm.
