William Wegman at MASI

From 8 September 2019 until 6 January 2020, Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana presents the exhibition William Wegman. Being Human: a selection of 100 works by the famous American photographer William Wegman featuring Weimaraner dogs. William Wegman, an eclectic master of contemporary American art is a renowned, versatile artist who resists an easy classification, as he moves adroitly between painting, drawing, photography, film, video, books and performances. He rose to prominence on the international art scene for his series of images featuring his dogs. Ever since he met his first Weimaraner - whom he named Man Ray - in the seventies, the photographer has made dogs of this breed the main focus of his photographs, using this rather unusual muse to portray characters, comment on fashion trends and address movements in art history with great perspicacity and irony. His Weimaraners Man Ray, Fay Ray, Penny, Bobbin, Chip, Chundo, and Crooky, and several generations of their pups, are the focus of his big Polaroids: unique and unretouched photographic prints, underlining the photographer’s skill and his subjects’ spontaneity and demonstrating the artist’s exceptional harmony with his dogs. Every shot may be viewed as the result of a partnership, rather than the creation of a single craftsman. Being Human looks back over the evolution of this unusual artistic partnership that has lasted thirty years, serving as a kind of mirror of human nature. “Is it really about dogs?” asks exhibition curator William A. Ewing. “Being Human suggests that it is not: the subject is us, and we are them: the housewife, the astronaut, the lawyer, the priest, the farmer, and even... the dog-sitter! Some of them pose with pride and confidence, while others express uncertainty or vulnerability: they are human beings!” The exhibition includes a selection of about 90 Polaroids along with a dozen pigment prints selected by exhibition curator William A. Ewing in close collaboration with the artist and divided into chapters, each of which brings together works which address a specific theme, or which are connected by similar visual allusions. The People like us section presents portraits of human types played by dogs: the dandy, the priest, the astronaut, the lady with the permanent wave. The personalities are so well-defined we seem to be able to imagine the past and the psychology of every one of them. Tales (or ‘tails’) includes historic portraits, set in elaborate scenes against painted backgrounds, and contemporary portraits incorporating references to literature and film. From the metamorphosis of dog to man, Wegman goes on to the paradoxical and grotesque dress-up scenes of Zoo and Masquerades: the Weimaraners, wearing masks or stage costumes, take the shape of other races of animals, whether they be chow-chows, cats or wolves. The Nudes section includes photographs in which the dogs’ agile, athletic bodies provide the material structure for abstract compositions, while in Hallucinations the body and its form dissolve completely, and the photographer transforms his subjects into ghostly presences. The photos in the Vogue series cover decades in the history of fashion, from casual to haute couture, interpreted with canine elegance and aplomb. Wegman touches upon artistic citations in the section entitled Cubists, immortalising his Weimaramers balancing on cubes and parallelepipeds. In one of the works in this series, a dog rests its front feet on a big black cube balanced on the corner of a smaller white cube: a Malevic with an intruder. In Color fields, the four-legged intruders break up the chromatic order while separating different fields of colour. Lastly, the artist picks up on this play of balance and geometry again in the final section, Sit/Stay, in which we see dogs, lying down or standing up, balancing a great variety of objects: the tension between the subject’s immobility and the elaborate compositions resting on the model's face or back bring to mind the rules of proportion so beloved of art historians. The exhibition is completed with a selection of films made by Wegman since the seventies. The films also feature Weimaraners, making use of the dogs’ deadpan comic talent to ironically imitate performances filmed by conceptual artists or represent clichés about art and artists. Being Human is a project originated by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis/ New York/ Paris/ Lausanne in partnership with Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, curated by William A. Ewing, an independent curator and former director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. The exhibition in Lugano is the first on a tour of European museums promoted by the Foundation.