WILLIAM WEGMAN
William Wegman (born 1943, Holyoke, Massachusetts) is an American artist and photographer whose practice across painting, photography, film, video, and writing has made him one of the most inventive and consistently surprising figures in American contemporary art since the 1970s. His early works were conceptual paintings, but by the early 1970s he had begun incorporating his Weimaraner dog Man Ray into his practice, producing a body of video and photographic work of quiet absurdism and deadpan wit that brought him to wide critical attention. The relationship between artist and dog, and the comic dignity with which Wegman treated his subjects, became the defining characteristic of a practice that was never reducible to a single mode or medium.
Following Man Ray’s death in 1982, Wegman continued the practice with subsequent Weimaraners, most notably Fay Ray and her offspring, producing large-format Polaroid portraits and elaborate photographic tableaux that drew on art history, literature, fairy tales, and popular culture with equal facility. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others, and he has been the subject of numerous retrospectives internationally.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.