Over the course of a career spanning nearly fifty years, Canadian artist Jeff Wall he transformed our understanding of photography and propelled the medium into the center of artistic practice. Since his first presentation of a photograph as transparency in a lightbox in 1978, Wall has composed images that reflect and actualize the social and historical narratives through a critical synthesis of artistic strategies of popular culture, cinema, literature and painting.
The Jeff Wall exhibition offers an intimate encounter with this paradigmatic work. It is a focused investigation of the artist's photographs and transparencies and includes some of his most famous tableaux by him. The works of the late 80s up to the 2000sthey are arranged in three groups, reflecting Wall's involvement with different historical genres, installed in a dramatic development across the three floors of the galleries.
A verdant street view capturing Wall's native Vancouver opens the exhibition, exemplifying the artist's reimagining of the beauty and sublime of the natural landscape, paying equal attention to the signifiers of modern life streets, ports, prisons and tract homes. In the same gallery is the key piece An Eviction (1988/2004), depicting a charged scene of human strife against a sweeping view of the Vancouver suburbs. This work, which is part of the George Economou Collection, marks the first time Wall uses digital tools to rework a large-scale photographic image—Eviction Struggle (1988), adding figures and elements from other photographs taken during filming—but not used.
On the second floor, a collection of photographic prints examines the work Wall has done since he suspended his production of transparencies in 2007. Three of the works, including portraits of two Vancouver costume historians and collectors, thematize clothing and its history. In contrast, Summer Afternoons (2013) is one of the artist's few treatments of the nude figure.
The exhibition concludes with a group of lightbox tableaux from the late 90s and early 2000s. Works such as Insomnia (1994) and Ralph Ellison's After "Invisible Man", the Prologue (1999-2000) are some of Wall's most iconic images and draw inspiration from a diverse range of narrative sources. Several show the archaeological mode of image-making made explicit in Fieldwork… (2003), whose depiction of archaeologists excavating cultural remains can be seen as a metaphor for Wall's own excavation of traditions and representational possibilities.
The exhibition is curated by art historian and curator Philipp Kaiser with Skarlet Smatana, director of the George Economou Collection, in close collaboration with the artist.
