Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver in 1946, studied art history at the University of British Columbia, and did doctoral research at the Courtauld Institute in London before returning to Vancouver to teach. The Destroyed Room of 1978, a ransacked bedroom built in the studio and composed after Delacroix, was the first of the large colour transparencies mounted in lightboxes that made his name. The pictures are made slowly, sometimes over months: staged with actors or re-enacted from things he has seen, built on sets or found locations, and since the early 1990s often assembled digitally from many exposures, as in Dead Troops Talk and A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai). He has also made large black-and-white prints and what he calls near-documentary pictures.

His output is small — a handful of pictures in a year — and the editions are small too, often one to three with an artist's proof, so the exact work, edition and format are the whole of the identification. The lightboxes combine a transparency, an aluminium box and fluorescent lighting, and each part raises its own issues: transparencies fade and discolour over time under their own lamps, and replacement of a transparency through the studio is a recognised practice that should be documented. The black-and-white works are large gelatin silver prints, and later colour works include inkjet prints. The certificate and the studio are the reference for every question of edition, condition and replacement.