Jeff Wall

   Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, where he is still living nowadays. In the 60s, he studies Art History at the University of British Coloumbia while participating in conceptual art movements and learning photography by himself. In 1974, after receiving his MA, he teaches in a school of art in Halifax, then at The University of Vancouver.

During a trip in Europe, in 1977, he discovers a painting made by Vélasquez and the reflection on the representation that this one involves. Yet realizing that the pictorial matter provokes an anachronistic effect on the viewer nowadays, as the painting is now absent from the daily, he decides to take up and address the major problems traditional pictorial by means in accordance with our "up-to-date" times, project which he will start the year following.

Thereby his photographs often refer to famous paintings of Manet and also Delacroix, Watteau... In printing them first on a transparent paper in large format, he puts them afterwards on a white cloth in order to accentuate the light, then, he puts them in a box with electric lighting. This device procures to his work a spectacular character. According to him he restitutes to photography the great presence and the radiance that the painting has lost and allows to his pictures to rival with the visual effectiveness of the omnipresent advertising .  Thus photography provides him a way to be "the painter of the modern life", as he insists in quoting Baudelaire. 

(photograph inspired by a painting of Manet)

Reading and viewing:

Rogallery select artworks online. com : http://rogallery.com/Wall_Jeff/wall-bio.html

The Art Institude of Chicago : http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/jeff_wall/overview.html

Vancouver Art Gallery: http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/pdfs/Jeff%20Wall%20Study%20Guide.pdf

Jeff Wall Catalogue Raisonnée 1978-2004  by Jean-Francois Chevrier 

Jeff Wall: Complete Edition by Thierry De Duve