Fortified door 2008 / 2010

Canadian artist Jeff Wall and his spectacular contemporary scenes motivated by the works of historical mentors in painting and literature have inspired an entire generation of photographers from Thomas Ruff to Sophie Calle. In 1967 he began to master the art of photography and since 1978 has continued to work in colored, large-format images framed in light boxes, which he augmented with black-and-white projects on paper in 1995. Through his inclusion in Kassel’s documenta 7 (1982), documenta 8 (1987), documenta X (1997), and documenta 11 in 2002, his work has come to be well known and highly valued by European curators as well.

One special feature of Wall’s photographs is that they are never created in series or working groups. Rather each image is a unique composition that stands on its own. Novels, paintings, and sculptures have inspired many of his images. An entire complex of works are allusions to famous paintings and sculptures. His photograph The Thinker/Le Penseur quotes the sculpture of the same name by August Rodin; The Storyteller and The Luncheon on the Grass recall the paintings of Édouard Manet; Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix was the basis for Wall’s photograph titled The Stumbling Block.

He stages many of his images to look like scenes of everyday life – a façade that belies en entire team’s hours and even sometimes days of work, including actors who pass through the picture as though by chance.

Even photographs without actors look like movie set stills and make the viewer curious to figure out the story hidden behind the surface. Such as those doors paneled in heavy wood and hanging on old ornamental hinges, which he documented as a pre-existing arrangement. The artist’s choice of black-and-white photography draws specifically upon the style of classic documentary photography and its traditional engagement with socially marginalized groups in society as well upon neorealist film. He has also dealt extensively with the technical history of the silver gelatin print and thus can always make thematic references to related earlier works. All these aspects point to Jeff Wall’s bond with the realist tradition of the nineteenth century. With contemporary attributes, however, he has masterfully updated and further developed the motifs, and many of his works have become icons of contemporary photography.

Christina Wendenburg