Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The work of Canadian artist Jeff Wall has established photography at the forefront of contemporary art. He deploys state-of-the-art film and computer technology while invoking the composition, scale and subject matter of such painters as Velazquez, Goya or Manet. This book is a complete catalogue of Wall's work to date (sixty works). His giant transparencies are mounted on light-boxes to combine the seductive glow of a cinema screen with the physical presence of minimalist sculpture. Wall's carefully composed miseen-scenes depict everyday social relations; they explore the heart of darkness that beats behind the glowing, media-saturated facade of the late twentieth century. Large surveys of his work have been presented at the Museums of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Helsinki; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Synopsis
Jeff Wall (b.1946) adopts the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as 'a painter of modern life' to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted on to light boxes that diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations.
Wall is foremost among the pioneering artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. His constructed images employ the latest sophisticated technology in the creation of compelling tableaux, which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-century history painting. When exhibited in their glowing light boxes they evoke both the seduction of the cinema screen and the physical presence of minimalist sculptures such as Dan Flavin's fluorescent light installations or Donald Judd's metal and Perspex wall reliefs. All of these elements - traditional figurative painting, cinema, Minimalism, Conceptual art, documentary photography - are consciously evoked and explored in Wall's work. Associated closely since the late 1960s with Conceptual artists such as Dan Graham, with whom he collaborated on The Children's Pavilion (1988-93), Wall has engaged at a sophisticated level with theories of representation and its social dimensions both as an artist and as a theoretical writer on contemporary art and culture.