About William Wegman

Betsy Senior has worked with the William Wegman studio for over twenty-five years. Works from the following series of archival pigment prints produced at the artist’s New York studio are available through Betsy Senior Fine Art.

Design Series

In 2015, William Wegman (American, b. 1943) began a series of photographs showcasing some of America’s most iconic mid-­century Modern furniture alongside his own best-­known models: his Weimaraners. As is the case in all of Wegman’s photographs, extraordinary care is given to the lighting and pose of his subjects,  both  living  and static, so that “Topper” and “Flo” share the spotlight with classic pieces by George Nakashima  and  Charles and Ray Eames. Julie Belcove, in her 2015 article for 1stdibs’ Introspective Magazine, describes the inspiration for the series. Wegman exploits the medium of the digital pigment print both for its immediacy  and  for  its potential for intensely saturated colors.  In tightly structured compositions, the bright shells and lustrous woods of Eames chairs and slab tables are highlighted, as well as the harmonious contrast between these furnishings and the silky coats of the dogs that balance dexterously atop them. Topper and Flo appear as sculptural objects, emulating the silhouette and style of the mise-­en‐scène. Still, the dogs assume almost human expressions, adding Wegman’s signature humor, irony, and playfulness to the work. The result is a series that suggests less a narrative than a surreal state of affairs captured in real time. Wegman continues to refine the ideas that began in his groundbreaking conceptual video work of the 1970s, in which short, staged vignettes using mundane found objects in humorous, improvised scenarios poked fun at the pieties and self-­seriousness of Conceptual Art.

Cubism and Other -Isms

Beginning in the early ‘90s while making videos and films with his dogs standing in as human characters, Wegman placed his subjects on elevated platforms in order to shoot them at eye level. Over the years, his props have taken many forms, but none so consistently as the cube, which in Joan Simon’s catalogue essay for the artist’s 2006 retrospective, Funney/Strange, represents “an art-about-art reference echoing both the pedestal of traditional sculpture and the Euclidean geometry of Minimalism.” The cube is also one of the most available on-set items in the studios of commercial photographers, used for displaying products in tableaux or isolation to highlight their form or shape. In these photographs, Wegman exploits his dogs’ lithe athleticism, posing them in precarious relationship to props configured to suggest the Suprematist compositions of Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist “tower”.

Public Projects by William Wegman

For further information about integrated public commissions, please contact us.