Accompanying the artist’s first major US overview in 15 years, this volume celebrates over four decades of Wall’s uncanny everyday dramas

Vancouver-based artist Jeff Wall (born 1946) has been making arresting, conceptually and politically complex pictures for over four decades. Using large-format photography that embraces both the deliberateness of painting and the immediacy of the moving image, he is known for immersive, sharply detailed scenes featuring figures enacting everyday dramas. Departing from the convention of street photography and its aspirations of authenticity, Wall instead favors the artificial and the cinematic; he meticulously plans and constructs his pictures, scouting locations, casting actors as subjects and organizing the shoots with the rigor of a movie production.
Jeff Wall accompanies the artist’s monographic exhibition at Glenstone, a survey of works made between 1978 and 2018. It is also his largest exhibition in the US since his widely acclaimed 2007 midcareer survey at the Museum of Modern Art. Comprising nearly 30 artworks, the catalog appraises the full range of the artist’s pioneering oeuvre, from early pictures displayed in backlit lightboxes and black-and-white silver gelatin prints to more recent large-scale inkjet color prints. Jeff Wall also features an introduction by Glenstone cofounder and director Emily Wei Rales and an essay by art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky.

Photographer(s): Jeff Wall
Text by: Barry Schwabsky