A look at: Jeff Wall

The artist Jeff Wall: short positioning

Jeff Wall is currently an artist 101 in the world, after a ranking of all exhibitions in the world created by computer evaluation, at least a good 600,000 exhibitions are already moved into the evaluation.

Around 2007, at the level of his work and fame, he was still around 50 ranks in this world rankings of art, but also 100-X certainly entitled to assume that art lovers either already want to know or get to know the artist Jeff Wall and his work.

His photography art made him one of the best-known photo artists of the present, several of his pictures are revered "icons of contemporary photography" This photography art is also classified as photographic concept art, a art movement that Jeff Wall experimented with in his early years.

Jeff Wall also became known for art -historical publications , e.g. B. over Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Stephan Balkenhol, on Kawara and other artists.

The focus of Jeff Wall's art

Jeff Wall takes pictures like films - every picture tells a story, every picture is carefully composed in the background to the smallest detail. These photographs can not only be viewed once, with every newly discovered detail the story that wants to transport the photo can also change.

As soon as it was available, Wall used digital editing programs, he began to put pictures from many details.

Jeff Wall discovered the light box early on as a presentation form and considered it to be the best form of presentation for his pictures. He described the light box as a delivery system (delivery system, in the sense of a sensible device to transport the content of his photo art).

Various art scientists moved parallels to the flaring sign , as used for the presentation of large -format advertising posters. Others reminds the presentation procedure of the appearance of the film image on a cinema screen, and it is agreed that the light box helps to dramatically present photography.

In Wall's photography, a connection to the cinema is seen for another reason: his photographs are rarely static, but almost always moved, or in the middle of the movements, individual figures or the entire scenery.

Where there is a lack of movements, it looks as if it has obviously just stopped - and still completes as part of a film, camera trip or awards just. In the picture restoration, this could have been a great 360-° camera trip.

The "staged photography" Jeff Walls realistically seems and only turns out to be a constructed fabulous reality, a concern of Wall, but not the only one.

Rather, Wall frequently sets references and thus brings the images into a historical context, in "The Destroyed Room", for example, he refers to Eugène Delacroix '"The Death of the Sardanapal" from 1828, today in the Louvre.

Wall interpreted new and contemporary, Delacroix 'chaotic history painting is translated into the medium of photography and here is unavailable still lifes, Delacroix' contradiction between unmoving convenience and archaic violence is transformed into a collision of violence and luxury, which is typical of Walls.

Jeff Wall is a very precisely working artist who takes a lot of time for his carefully staged photographs. So far, he has only published 166 photo work in his entire career for almost four decades.

His photo works of art are prepared, recorded and processed until the result exceeds reality. For the photo "Man Waiting" , in 2007 20 men appeared in rainwear for two weeks a day and stood on the corner with the black umbrella for hours until the photo of the waiting man for Jeff Wall really looked like a waiting man.

Jeff Wall's art: examples

• "The Destroyed Room", 1978
• "Milk", 1984
• "The storyteller", 1986
• "A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947" , 1990, open picture
• "The Pine on the Corner" , 1990, open the picture
• "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)" , 1993, open image , a completely composed picture, hat, man, tree and leaves were put together without trace from individual recordings.
• "Restoration", 1993

Works of art by Jeff Wall on Pinterest

Jeff Wall's public work: exhibitions, art in public space and in public collections

Jeff Wall can currently (November 2015) look back at 72 individual exhibitions and 367 group exhibitions , 100 of them in Germany, 90 in the USA, 44 in France, 35 in Spain, 31 in Canada and the rest of the world, Australia, Australia, England, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ukraine and others.

Jeff Wall has exhibited several times at Documenta in Kassel: Documenta 7 1982, Documenta 8 1987, Documenta 10 1997 and also Documenta 11 2002.

The largest exhibition of his works took place in 2005, all summer and in the Schaulager Basel, Switzerland. Large parts of this exhibition hiked to the London Tate Modern in October 2005 and were shown there until January 2006.

In spring 2007, he was devoted to the entire top floor of the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York for his exhibition. He seems to have exceeded the highlight of its popularity with this exhibition, his computer -calculated ranking after exhibition presence from 55th place to the current place 101.

Photographs by Jeff Wall can be seen in the public collections of the following 13 countries:

• Australia , Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA
• Belgium , Museum Voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerp
• Germany , Museum Ludwig Cologne, K20 + K21 Dusseldorf, Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt/Main, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, GOETZ + Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus + Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, art museum Wolfsburg
• Italy , Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina Napoli, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Turin, Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus Venice
• Finland , Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
• France , Frac Aquitaine Bordeaux, Frac Nord-Pas de Calais Dunkerque, Frac Champagne-Ardenne Reims, Musee de Grenoble, Musée Municipal d'Art la Roche-Sur-Yon, Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain Paris, Musée Départemental d'Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, Institute d'Art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes Villeurbanne
• Canada , Mcintosh Gallery London, On, Musée D´Art Contemporain de Montréal, Qc, Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, On, Vancouver Art Gallery, BC
• Netherlands , Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, de Pont Museum of Contemporary Art Tilburg
• Austria , Museum Modern Art Foundation Ludwig (Mumok) Vienna
• Portugal , Ellipse Foundation, Alcoitão
• Switzerland , Basel Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art Basel, Lucerne Art Museum, Kunsthaus Zurich
• Spain , Cal Cego - Colleccion de Arte Contemporaneo + Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba) Barcelona, ​​Centro de Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear Cáceres, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Málaga
• USA , The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, The Art Institute of Chicago + Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL, The Margulies Collection Miami, FL, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA

How did Jeff Wall get art?

In the mid -1960s, he studied art history at the University of British Columbia and at the same time continued to art, inspired by the emerging concept art movement and its anti -capitalist credo: art of aesthetics and market value. This culminated in Landscape Manual (1969–70) , a black and white brochure with snapshots and texts that documented a Walls car ride through the dark suburbs of Vancouvers. Despite this groundbreaking work, Wall was dissatisfied with the conceptual orientation and took a break from artistic work from 1971 to 1977.

In the meantime, he started a doctorate in art history in London, where he eagerly read: philosophy, critical theory and history of painting, sculpture and photography. He also dealt with the European art cinema, especially with the narrative films of authors such as Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. During his three-year research stay at the Courtory Institute of Art of the University of London, he worked with Manet expert TJ Clark.

After his return to Vancouver in 1973, Wall started making a film with the employees Ian Wallace and Rodney Graham. Although the project has never been completed, this advance in storytelling inspired his "kinematographic photo" - a concept that is of central importance for its later practice and in which every photo is carefully staged and rehearsed like a scene from a film.

It was not until 1977 that Jeff Wall started again with the art, now in his very own form of photography, in which he relates to artists such as Diego Velázquez, Hokusai and Édouard Manet or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima and Ralph Ellison.

When Wall started producing its large-format transparent films in autumn 1977, he tried to differentiate his practice from documentary and street photography, which had largely dominated the medium up to this point. For Wall, every photo was "an isolated statement" that required the same lasting attention as a painting or a film.

Wall's later photographs move from a conceptual comment to a kind of increased materialism . In "Milk" Wall stages a moment that he has witnessed in real life, new - a process that he calls "almost documentary". A visibly tense man sits bent on the sidewalk, while milk drips spectacularly out of the container in his hand.

In After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the prologue, Wall creates an imaginary scene from Ellison's novel from 1952 with a dizzying variety of details - the most striking is the dense curtain from light bulbs that hang over the bright basement of the protagonist.

These later works represent ordinary scenes with intensive, almost febrile clarity and emphasize material textures and sensory details compared to abstract concepts. This demonstrates the incessant development of Wall's creative vision. Wall's work is full of surprising directions and changes and will continue to remain (see MoMA ).

Jeff Wall today

Although Wall continues to make large, highly stylized photographic tableau who deal with the world and against mirrors , he has changed from an interest in "near-documentation" to a purely aesthetic "haunting image" , which indicates a greater request to create a unique request instead of creating a theoretical or historical line for his pictures.

He describes this change as "the need to deviate from this [almost documentation] and try to take pictures that are more pictorial." For Wall, the process of creating the image is more interesting than holding a moment. He explains that "photography should be instantly" , but for him "the plasticity of the process, in which things turn into something else, arises from the time I spend."

He only produces very few finished work every year and his photo shoots often last several days, whereby the production costs can be over $ 100,000. Similarly, the price of its photographs has increased dramatically over the years, with the recent gallery exhibitions and museum retrospectives only strengthened its status in the art world.

Jeff Wall as a public person: prices and awards, teaching activities, aftermath

In 1996 Jeff Wall received the International Art Prize of the Cultural Foundation of the Stadtsparkasse Munich and in 2003 the Roswitha Legking Prize, a prize for "excellent performance in the field of visual arts" since 2001 "

In 2002 Wall was honored with the Hasselblad Award , which has been awarded by the Hasselblad Foundation since 1980 in recognition of significant performance to photographers, the insider believes the world's most important award in photography.

He shares this significant award with legends of photo art and photo artists who are quite likely to become such legends, e.g. B.: Henri Cartier-Bresson (prize winner 1982), Irving Penn (1985), Sebastião Salgado (1989), Susan Meiselas (1994), William Eggleston (1998), Cindy Sherman (1999), Bernd and Hilla Becher (2004), Lee Friedlander (2005), Nan Goldin (2007), Robert Adams (2009), Paul Graham (2012), Wolfgang Tillmans (2015)

In 2006 Jeff Wall was admitted to the Royal Society of Canada (Canadian Academy of Sciences), in 2007 he became the officer of the Order of Canada (Canada's highest award for civilians, motto "Who desire a better fatherland"), in 2008 he received the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement from British Columbia University.

In 1974 Wall began the first teaching activity in the art science area , at the Courtiagy Institute of Art of the University of London, which he continues to this day.

1974 to 1975 Wall taught Wall as an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design , 1976 to 1987 he worked as a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University, and he also taught at the European Graduate School, a non-profit facility for interdisciplinary studies in Switzerland.

Wall's large-format photo arts and staged compositions are said to have significantly influenced several members of the "Düsseldorf Photography School" , Andreas Gursky ("Wall was a great role model for me"), Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer.

Artistic legacy

Wall is considered an innovative pioneer in the redesign of conceptual photography and the questioning of the nature of a photographic "truth". According to Sheena Wagstaff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art , "he worked against the grain to develop the photographic genre in areas where it was completely rejected or ignored."

In addition, she claims that "he really influenced the way people see the world through the lens worldwide." His work influenced the following generations of artists, for example the Düsseldorf group, which includes photographers Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff , Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky - Gursky said Wall was "a great role model for me" .

Wall's work has opened up the opportunity to break out of its traditional borders, both in the area of ​​visual arts and in their role in the presentation of real life as it develops.

Wall is also a highly respected art theorist and teacher who writes about contemporary art and artists and gives lectures. His essay "Marks of Indifference": Aspects of Photography in, OR AS, Conceptual Art " (1995) is still considered one of the most important essays about the development of conceptual art and participating processes in art production and art reception due to its urgent but clear discussion. A large part of his writings can be found in his book Jeff Wall: Selected essays and interviews.

His influence extends beyond the world of fine arts. For example, when she appeared at the Grammy award ceremony in 2015, the singer Sia reproduced the light bulb and housing backdrop of Walls after “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the prologue, and cited Wall's ability to create a sense of magical realism for her own artistic work.

With the words of curator Peter Galassi :

"When Jeff's pictures are successful, they are successful in a way that nobody else can do - it is a kind of art that nobody else practices."

The private Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and now lives in South Florida, USA.

Wall already met his wife Jeannette during his studies in Vancouver, an Englishwoman with whom he was already giving the world in the world in the 1960s.

Current access to Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall's photo works of art were last seen in the following exhibitions:

Large special exhibition in the new Kunsthalle Mannheim was devoted to the international photo artist Jeff Wall in 2018. "The imaginary museum works from the Center Pompidou, the Tate and the MMK" ran in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main (MMK 2 in the Taunusturm)

The Johnen Galerie Berlin presented 20 pictures of Jeffal Wall on its website Johlingengalerie.de, which could also be viewed enlarged in a slideshow.

The Fondation Beyeler extensive solo exhibition to the Canadian artist at the beginning of next year 202 . It is the artist's first show show in Switzerland for two decades. More information under Fondation Beyeler: Jeff Wall 28th Jan - Apr 21, 2024 )

Unfortunately, there are currently no exhibitions on Jeff Wall in Germany.

Recommended literature on Jeff Wall

• Scenarios in the image space of reality. Essays and interviews. Fundus Vol. 142: Essays and interviews. Edited by Gregor Stemmrich ( link to the book* )
• Jeff Wall. Specific Pictures, by Stefan Gronert, September 20, 2016 ( link to the book* )
• Jeff Wall. Transit (Kat. Cat. State Art Collections in Dresden, June 20-19, 2010) ( Link to the Book* )
• Jeff Wall. Catalog Raisonné 1978–2004, ed. v. Theodora Vischer and Heidi Naef ( link to the book* )
• Jeff Wall, Exhibition Catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1995lee Robbins, 'Lightbox, Camera, Action!', ArtNews, Vol.94, No.9, Nov. 1995, PP.220-3

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