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Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall is renowned for large-format photographs with subject matter that ranges from mundane corners of the urban environment to elaborate tableaux that take on the scale and complexity of nineteenth-century history paintings.
Wall seized on the idea of producing large, backlit photographs after seeing an illuminated advertisement from a bus window. He had recently been to the Prado, Madrid, and the artist combined his knowledge of the Western pictorial tradition – he had studied art history at London’s Courtauld Institute – with his interest in contemporary media to create one of most influential visions in contemporary art. Wall calls his photographs, after Charles Baudelaire, ‘prose poems’, a description that emphasises how each picture should be experienced rather than used to illustrate a pre-determined idea or a specific narrative. His pictures may depict an instant and a scenario, but the before and after that moment are left completely unknown, allowing them to remain open to multiple interpretations. The prose poem format allows any truth claims of the photograph – the facts we expect from journalistic photography – to remain suspended, and Wall believes that in that suspension the viewer experiences pleasure.
Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives and works. He has exhibited widely, including group shows ‘Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today’, Whitechapel, London (2004), Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002), ‘The Age of Moderism: Art in the 20th Century’, Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Künste, Berlin (1997), Documenta 10, Kassel, Germany (1997). Solo shows include ICA, London (1984), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (1993), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2001), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2001), Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden (2002), Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway (2004) and retrospectives at Schaulager, Basel (2005), Tate Modern (2005) and MoMA, New York (2007), which travels to the Chicago Art Institute and SFMoMA, San Francisco.
More on Jeff Wall
| Artworks | |
 | I 4 Images |
 | II 4 Images |
 | IV 4 Images |
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Exhibitions | |
| Jeff Wall 27 Nov—19 Jan 2008 | |
| The Giant 11 Feb—26 Feb 1994 | |
| Artist's Publications Available in the Bookshop |
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| Black and White Photographs 1996-2007 2007 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/mode... Tate Online | |
| http://www.moma.org/exhibit... Museum of Modern Art, New York | |
| http://mariangoodman.com/mg... Marian Goodman Gallery, New York | |
 | Back to Artist Index |