Author(s): Jeff Wall

Monographs & Portraiture

Jeff Wall adopts the 19th-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his painter contemporaries as a "painter of modern life" to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted onto light boxes which diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and "constructed" social situations. Jeff Wall is foremost among the pioneering artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. His construced images employ the latest sophisticated technology in the creation of compelling tableaux which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to 19th-century history painting. When exhibited in their glowing light boxes they evoke both the seduction of the cinema screen and the physical presence of minimalist sculptures such as Dan Flavin's fluorescent light installations or Donald Judd's metal and perspex wall reliefs. All of these elements - traditional figurative painting, cinema, Minimalism, Conceptual art, documentary photography - are consciously evoked and explored in Wall's work.