Jeff Wall valuation
Makes photographs the way a painter or a film director makes pictures, and shows many of them as lit transparencies.
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.
What a work by Jeff Wall is worth
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Bio
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.
Berlin Dada, Documenta and the Hasselblad Award
Wall's MA thesis at the University of British Columbia, in 1970, was on Berlin Dada, and he then made no art until 1977. He counts Picture for Women, a reply to Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, with The Destroyed Room as his first real success, and Mimic, of 1982, is typical of the work of that decade.
After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, of 1999 to 2000, with its 1,369 light bulbs, was first shown at Documenta 11. He received the Hasselblad Award in 2002 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2007, and Tate Modern showed Jeff Wall Photographs 1978–2004 in 2005.
The Vancouver School, the silver prints and MoMA
With Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace he is counted among the Vancouver School, and he has written essays on all three. He says the lightbox came to him from the backlit advertisements at bus stops on a trip between Spain and London, and his first show, at the Nova Gallery in Vancouver in 1978, put The Destroyed Room in the shop window behind a plasterboard wall. A Sudden Gust of Wind took more than a year and a hundred photographs to assemble, and Susan Sontag closed her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, with a long discussion of Dead Troops Talk.
He began making black and white gelatin silver prints in 1995, and examples were shown at Documenta X. Retrospectives followed at the Schaulager in Basel in 2005 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, travelling to Chicago and San Francisco, and for his show in Brussels in 2011 he hung 25 of his own pictures among some 130 works by artists he admires, from Atget to Thomas Struth. Andreas Gursky has called him a great model.
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