Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit

Cibachrome Ilfochrome (also commonly known as Cibachrome) is a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process used for the reproduction of film transparencies on photographic paper. The prints are made on a dimensionally stable polyester base as ...

photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the

Vancouver School The Vancouver School of Conceptual art, conceptual or post-conceptual photography (often referred to as photoconceptualismSarah Milroy "Is Arden our next greatest photographer?" ''Globe and Mail'' (October 27, 2007): R1.) is a loose term applied t ...

and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites

Rodney Graham William Rodney Graham (January 16, 1949 – October 22, 2022) was a Canadian visual artist and musician. He was closely associated with the Vancouver School. Early life Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on January 16, 1949. ...

Ken Lum Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA (; born 1956) is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual i ...

, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Career

Wall received his MA from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

in 1970, with a thesis titled ''Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context''. That same year, he stopped making art. With his English wife, Jeannette, whom he had met as a student in Vancouver, and their two young sons, he moved to LondonArthur Lubow (February 25, 2007)
The Luminist
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

''. to do postgraduate work from 1970 to 1973 at the

Courtauld Institute The Courtauld Institute of Art (), commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist coll ...

, where he studied with T.J. Clark.Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", p. 83 Wall was assistant professor at the

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design NSCAD University, also known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design or NSCAD, is a public art university in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The university is a co-educational institution that offers bachelor's and master's degrees. The uni ...

(1974–75), associate professor at

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from ...

(1976–87), taught for many years at the University of British Columbia, and lectured at the

European Graduate School The European Graduate School (EGS) is a private graduate school that operates in two locations: Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Valletta, Malta. History It was founded in 1994 in Saas-Fee, Switzerland by the Swiss scientist, artist, and therapist, Pao ...

. He has published essays on

Dan Graham Daniel Graham (March 31, 1942 – February 19, 2022) was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned ...

Roy Arden Roy Arden (born 1957) is a Canadian artist, born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He also creates sculpture from found objects, oil paintings, graphite drawings and collage, and curates and writes on contemporary art. Career Arden gra ...

, Stephan Balkenhol,

On Kawara was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in New York City from 1965. He took part in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976. Early life Kawara was born in Kariya, Japan on December 24, 1932. After graduating fro ...

, and other contemporary artists.

Artistic practice

Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at UBC. He then made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit photo-transparencies. Most of these are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. Their compositions often allude to artists like

Diego Velázquez Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptized June 6, 1599August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of th ...

Hokusai , known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock printing in Japan, woodblock print series ''Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'', which includes the ...

, and

Édouard Manet Édouard Manet (, ; ; 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883) was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Born ...

, or to writers such as

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...

Yukio Mishima , born , was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, Nationalism, nationalist, and founder of the , an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was ...

, and

Ralph Ellison Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel ''Invisible Man'', which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote ''Shadow and Act'' (1964), a collecti ...

.Newman, "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp", pp. 83–4 Presenting his first gallery exhibition in 1978 as an "installation" rather than as a photography show, Wall placed '' The Destroyed Room'' in the storefront window of the Nova Gallery, enclosing it in a plasterboard wall. ''Mimic'' (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style and according to art historian

Michael Fried Michael Martin Fried (born April 12, 1939 in New York City) is a modernist art critic and art historian. He studied at Princeton University and Harvard University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. He is the J.R. Herbert Boone Pr ...

is "characteristic of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues". A 198 × 226 cm colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American industrial suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, "slanting" his eye in mockery of the Asian man's eyes. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist. ''

Picture for Women ''Picture for Women'' is a photographic work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Produced in 1979, ''Picture for Women'' is a key early work in Wall's career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art through ...

'' is a 142.5 × 204.5 cm

transparency mounted on a lightbox. Along with ''The Destroyed Room'', Wall considers ''Picture for Women'' to be his first success in challenging photographic tradition. According to

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

, this success allows Wall to reference "both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting. As three-dimensional objects, the lightboxes take on a sculptural presence, impacting on the viewer’s physical sense of orientation in relationship to the work." There are two figures in the scene, Wall himself, and a woman looking into the camera. In a profile of Wall in ''

The New Republic ''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...

'',

art critic An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...

Jed Perl describes ''Picture for Women'' as Wall's signature piece, "since it doubles as a portrait of the late-twentieth-century artist in his studio." Art historian

David Campany David Campany (born 8 October 1967) is a British writer, curator, artist and educator, working mainly with photography. He has written and edited books; contributed essays and reviews to other books, journals, magazines and websites; curated pho ...

calls ''Picture for Women'' an important early work for Wall as it establishes central themes and motifs found in much of his later work. A response to Manet's '' Un bar aux Folies Bergère'', the

wall text for ''Picture of Women'', from the 2005–2006 exhibition ''Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004'', outlines the influence of Manet's painting:

In Manet’s painting, a barmaid gazes out of frame, observed by a shadowy male figure. The whole scene appears to be reflected in the mirror behind the bar, creating a complex web of viewpoints. Wall borrows the internal structure of the painting, and motifs such as the light bulbs that give it spatial depth. The figures are similarly reflected in a mirror, and the woman has the absorbed gaze and posture of Manet’s barmaid, while the man is the artist himself. Though issues of the male gaze, particularly the power relationship between male artist and female model, and the viewer’s role as onlooker, are implicit in Manet’s painting, Wall updates the theme by positioning the camera at the centre of the work, so that it captures the act of making the image (the scene reflected in the mirror) and, at the same time, looks straight out at us.

Wall's work advances an argument for the need for

pictorial An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

art. Some of Wall's photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets, crews and digital postproduction. They have been characterized as one-frame cinematic productions.

Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...

ended her last book, ''

Regarding the Pain of Others ''Regarding the Pain of Others'' is a 2003 book-length essay by Susan Sontag, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was her last published book before her death in 2004. It is regarded by many to be a follow-up or ad ...

'' (2003), with a long, laudatory discussion of one of them, '' Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986)'' (1992), calling Wall's

Goya Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and ...

-influenced depiction of a made-up event "exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power." While Wall is known for large-scale photographs of contemporary everyday genre scenes populated with figures, in the early 1990s he became interested in still lifes. He distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like ''Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003'', and "cinematographic" pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as ''

A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) ''A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)'' is a color photograph made by Jeff Wall in 1993. The large photograph is a rework version of the woodcut ''Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga'' (''c.'' 1832) by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. The ...

'', 1993. Based on ''Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga'' (ca. 1832) a woodblock print by

Katsushika Hokusai , known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series '' Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji'', which includes the iconic print ''The Great W ...

, ''A Sudden Gust of Wind'' recreates the depicted 19th-century Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, using actors and took over a year to produce 100 photographs in order "to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time." Since the early 1990s, Wall has used digital technology to create montages of different individual negatives, blending them into what appears as a single unified photograph.Jeff Wall, October 25, 2008 to January 25, 2009
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. His signature works are large transparencies mounted on light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. In 1995, Wall began making traditional silver gelatine black and white photographs, and these have become an increasingly significant part of his work. Examples were exhibited at Kassel's

documenta ''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...

X. First shown at

documenta 11 Documenta11 was the eleventh edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 8 June and 15 September 2002 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Okwui Enwezor.Documenta11_Plattform5: Ausstellung. Kata ...

, '' After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue'' (1999–2000) represents a well-known scene from Ellison's classic novel. Wall's version shows us the cellar room, "warm and full of light," in which Ellison's narrator lives, complete with its 1,369 lightbulbs.

Exhibitions

Wall's early group exhibitions include 1969 shows at the

Seattle Art Museum The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...

, Washington, and

Vancouver Art Gallery The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) is an art museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The museum occupies a adjacent to Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, making it the largest art museum in Western Canada by building size. Designed by Franc ...

, and New Multiple Art at the

Whitechapel Gallery The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fir ...

, London in 1970. His first one-man show was held at Nova Gallery, Vancouver in 1978. Solo shows include ICA, London (1984),

Irish Museum of Modern Art The Irish Museum of Modern Art ( ga, Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann) also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. Located in Kilmainham, Dublin, the Museum pr ...

, Dublin, Ireland (1993),

, London (2001),

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is an art museum in central Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, opened 1994. It presents modern and contemporary art and is financed by the ''Kunststiftung Volkswagen.'' It takes up aspects of the industrial city of Wolfsburg, whic ...

, Wolfsburg, Germany (2001),

Museum für Moderne Kunst The Museum für Moderne Kunst (''Museum of Modern Art''), or short MMK, in Frankfurt, was founded in 1981 and opened to the public 6 June 1991. The museum was designed by the Viennese architect Hans Hollein. Because of its triangular shape, it i ...

Frankfurt (2001/2002), Hasselblad Center, Göteborg, Sweden (2002), Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, Norway (2004) and retrospectives at

Schaulager The Schaulager is a museum in Newmünchenstein, a sub-district of Münchenstein in the canton of Basel-Country, Switzerland. Built in 2002/2003 under commission of the Laurenz Foundation, it was designed by the renowned architectural office of ...

, Basel (2005),

(2005) and

MoMA Moma may refer to: People * Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist * Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician * Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher Places ; Ang ...

, New York (2007),

Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...

(2007), SFMoMA, San Francisco (2008), Tamayo Museum, Mexico City and

, Vancouver (2008), and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (2010). Wall was also included in

s 10 and 11. For his retrospective at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels in 2011, Wall chose some 130 works by his favorite artists, from 1900s photographer

Eugène Atget Eugène Atget (; 12 February 1857 – 4 August 1927) was a French ''flâneur'' and a pioneer of documentary photography, noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to mod ...

to film excerpts (Fassbinder, Bergman, the

Dardenne brothers Brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne (; born 21 April 1951) and Luc Dardenne (born 10 March 1954), collectively referred to as the Dardenne brothers, are a Belgian filmmaking duo. They write, produce, and direct their films together. The Dardennes b ...

) to pieces by contemporaries

Thomas Struth Thomas Struth (born 11 October 1954) is a German photographer who is best known for his ''Museum Photographs'' series, family portraits and black and white photographs of the streets of Düsseldorf and New York taken in the 1970s. Struth lives ...

and

David Claerbout David Claerbout (born 1969, Kortrijk, Belgium) is a Belgian artist. His work combines elements of still photography and the moving image. Early life and education Claerbout studied at Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp from ...

. They were shown alongside 25 of his own pictures.

Recognition

Wall was among the names in

Blake Gopnik Blake Gopnik (born 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011. He previously spent a decade as chief art critic of ''The Washington Post'', prior to which he was an arts editor and criti ...

's 2011 list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "For three decades, Wall has been testing the full range of what pictures can still do and mean, after

anti-art Anti-art is a loosely used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Somewhat paradoxically, anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage poi ...

had 'proved' them dead." The artist has also gotten the following accolades: *

Hasselblad Award The Hasselblad Award (in full: Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography) is an award granted to "a photographer recognized for major achievements". History The award—and the Hasselblad Foundation—was set up from the estate ...

, 2002. *Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

, 2006. *Officer of the

Order of Canada The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit. To coincide with the ...

, December 2007. * Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement (British Columbia's annual award for the visual arts), March 2008.

Influence

Wall's large-scale images and studied compositions are regarded as influential on the

Düsseldorf School of Photography Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...

led by

Andreas Gursky Andreas Gursky (born 15 January 1955) is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his Large format (photography), large format architecture and Landscape photography, landscape colour photogr ...

Thomas Ruff Thomas Ruff (born 10 February 1958) is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images". Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German ...

, and

Candida Höfer Candida Höfer (born 4 February 1944) is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, ...

. (Gursky has cited Wall as "a great model for me.")

Bibliography

* Jean-François Chevrier,

Thierry de Duve Thierry de Duve (born 1944) is a Belgian professor of modern art theory and contemporary art theory, and both teaches and publishes books in the field. He is an art critic and curates exhibitions. He has been a visiting professor at the University ...

Boris Groys Boris Efimovich Groys (born 19 March 1947) is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a global distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe Univer ...

, Mark Lewis, Arielle Pelenc. ''Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition.'' Phaidon, 2009. * Jeff Wall. ''Selected Essays and Interviews.'' New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007.

Notes

References

* Hochdörfer, Achim, ed. ''Jeff Wall: Photographs''. Cologne: Walther König, 2003. * Merritt, Naomi. ‘Manet's Mirror and Jeff Wall's Picture for Women: Reflection or Refraction?’, Emaj (Electronic Melbourne Art Journal), Issue 4, 2009
emaj: online journal of art
* Newman, Michael. "Towards the Reinvigoration of the 'Western Tableau': Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp." ''Oxford Art Journal'' 30.1 (2007): 81–100. * Del Río, Víctor. ''La querella oculta. Jeff Wall y la crítica de la neovanguardia''. El Desvelo Ediciones, 2012. Spain. * Lauter, Rolf. ''Jeff Wall: figures & places: selected works from 1978–2000''; Frankfurt: Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2001/2002.

External links

Jeff Wall resources and exhibition at Tate

Jeff Wall Exhibition in MoMA

June 29 – September 23, 2007
Jeff Wall Kapsul Image CollectionPictures Like Poems. An interview with Jeff Wall
Video by

Louisiana Channel Louisiana Channel is a non-profit web-TV channel based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. By the end of the first year, 28 November 2013, Louisiana Channel had published 130 videos featuring international artists, film m ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wall, Jeff Canadian contemporary artists 1946 births Living people Postmodern artists Alumni of the Courtauld Institute of Art Artists from Vancouver Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada NSCAD University faculty Officers of the Order of Canada University of British Columbia alumni 20th-century Canadian artists 20th-century Canadian photographers 21st-century Canadian photographers Simon Fraser University faculty European Graduate School faculty

Career

Artistic practice

Exhibitions

Recognition

Influence

Bibliography

Notes

References

Further reading

External links