When William Wegman enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1965, his aim was to paint. Dubbed “Bill the Painter” in high school, he considered himself as such. But, in the late 1960s, when the death of painting was announced, the freshly graduated artist abandoned the medium: “I wanted to be alive, so I stopped”. It is thus as a conceptual artist, a pioneer of video art, that he began his work in California. He then moved to New York, where he pursued video and photography. In 1969, Harald Szeeman invited him to participate in the seminal When Attitudes Become Form exhibition.

In the early 1970s, Wegman collaborates with his first Weimaraner dog, Man Ray; together they became famous. Bill and Man Ray play around with everyday items, this playful aspect becoming essential. The work is a “shared recreational activity”. They explore ideas of metamorphosis, anthropomorphism. Dogs become cats, houseplants, they merge with the scenery… Humanity is central to these images, William Wegman and his dogs deride our mannerisms and appearance with a subtle and compelling humor.

In 1978, the artist is invited to test out the brand new Polaroid camera, the 20×24 format, a large format darkroom of which only six models were produced. From this moment on, Man Ray, followed by Fay Ray, are ubiquitous: Vogue, Sesame Street, The New Yorker, Saturday Night Live…

Despite his early claims, William Wegman never truly abandoned painting, “a secret vice”. As early as 1982, when Man Ray passed away, he took up the paintbrush again to depict landscapes and architectures. Since the 1990s, he has completed over 400 paintings, using his huge postcards collection to guide his painting towards new and unexpected directions. This ongoing series is parallel to other paintings in which architecture, words, humor, etc., demonstrate the plurality of William Wegman’s trajectories since the 1970s.

Many retrospective exhibitions have been organized surrounding his oeuvre in Europe, in Asia, and in the United States; his works have entered the collections of major museums such as the MET, the MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, etc.