Bridge in Question copy

William Wegman, “Bridge in Question” (2012), oil, ink, graphite, and postcard on wood panel (all images courtesy William Wegman Studio and Sperone Westwater, New York)

Among a particular generation of Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live viewers, artist William Wegman is known almost exclusively for his goofy photos and videos of his pet Weimaraners dressed up in human clothing. Before he was a dog photographer, though, Wegman studied painting, a practice he’s continued, prolifically, to this day. William Wegman: Postcard Paintings, now on view at Sperone Westwater, highlights some of his lesser-known but equally funny and imaginative works in oil. The show coincides with the publication of William Wegman: Paintings (Abrams), a new monograph featuring essays by Amy Hempel, Robert Krulwich, and Susan Orlean.

Wegman is an avid collector of vintage postcards, picturing everything from ski resorts and famous artworks to Italian restaurants and bad ’80s fashion. To create his Postcard Paintings, Wegman glued some of these postcards onto wood panels, then painted fantastical scenes beyond their borders, elaborating on the printed images. The conceit could become a shtick in the hands of a lazier artist, but Wegman executes it with his signature humor and an impeccable handling of composition and color.

Reinstallation copy

William Wegman, “Reinstallation” (2013), oil and postcards on wood panel (click to enlarge)

It’s art about art, but in a way that’s fun, not pedantic or particularly meta. That’s thanks to his brand of absurd comedy, made famous by Fay Ray the dog as Little Red Riding Hood — Wegman is a master of the visual punchline. One work, for instance, depicts a woman smirking in a gallery, surrounded by postcards that feature gold-framed portraits of dead white men in powdered wigs; she’s planning to hang a couple portraits of women alongside them to even the score. Another is a cheeky high-low mashup: in a gallery hung with postcards from famous art museum gift shops — including images of Picasso’s “Weeping Woman,” Goya’s “Saturn Devours His Son,” and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — Wegman slips in a treacly winter wonderland by Thomas Kincade and a souvenir postcard from Yosemite National Park.

SW 16047 Inside Outside copy

William Wegman, “Inside Outside” (2012) (click to enlarge) (click to enlarge)

In some paintings, Wegman goes maximalist with the postcard conceit, creating MC Escher–like plays on our perception of space. In one architectural composition, the walls of a seemingly never-ending hallway are hung with progressively smaller paintings (postcards), creating a study of perspective and dimension that feels Cubistic. But the quieter paintings are some of the most poignant. In a hazy lavender landscape painted around a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, cars fade into question marks and dollar signs. Another features a landscape postcard with a man’s fragmented head that becomes a painting hanging on the wall of the man’s bleak office. It’s a melancholic illustration of the dissonance between fantasy-driven art and bland reality.

These are Matryoshka dolls of composition: the postcards become paintings within paintings. The best pieces are also games of camouflage, so expertly are the postcards blended into their surrounding scenes. Together, the works suggest a kind of infinite regress, a Powers of Ten–style zoom-out in which the earth itself is finally revealed as a picture on a postcard — perhaps in a galaxy shaped like a Weimaraner in a wig.

Lobby Abstract copy

William Wegman, “Lobby Abstract” (2015), oil and postcards on wood panel

The Great Indoors copy

William Wegman, “The Great Indoors” (2013), oil and postcards on wood panel

SW 16058 All Over installation image 3

Installation view, ‘William Wegman: Postcard Paintings’ at Sperone Westwater (2016) (click to enlarge)

Second Floor installation 2

Installation view, ‘William Wegman: Postcard Paintings’ at Sperone Westwater (2016) (click to enlarge)

William Wegman: Postcard Paintings continues at Sperone Westwater (257 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through April 23.

Carey Dunne is a Brooklyn-based writer covering arts and culture. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Baffler, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.