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Jeff Wall: Complete Edition

Jeff Wall (b.1946) adopts the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as 'a painter of modern life' to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted on to light boxes that diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations. Wall is foremost among the pioneering artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. His constructed images employ the latest sophisticated technology in the creation of compelling tableaux, which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-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. Associated closely since the late 1960s with Conceptual artists such as Dan Graham, with whom he collaborated on The Children's Pavilion (1988-93), Wall has engaged at a sophisticated level with theories of representation and its social dimensions both as an artist and as a theoretical writer on contemporary art and culture. The survey by Thierry de Duve, author of "Pictorial Nominalism" and "The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp", proposes an alternative history of modernism. Critic and curator Arielle Pelenc talks with the artist on themes ranging from storytelling to cinematography. Boris Groys, author of "Contemporary Art from Moscow", focuses on the meaning of light in Wall's work. The update section by French art critic and historian of photograpy Jean-Francois Chevrier surveys Wall's work from 1995 to the present. The artist has chosen texts by Blasie Pascal and Franz Kafka for the "Artist's Choice", and the "Artist's Writings" celebrate Wall as an art historian and theorist by including key essays and important interviews.

Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946)
A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
Silver dye bleach transparency in light box
90 3/16 x 148 7/16" (229 x 377 cm)
Tate. Purchased with the assistance of the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery
Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund
© 2006 Jeff Wall

After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue 1999–2000
Transparency in lightbox 1740 x 2505 mm

Throughout his career, the influential art photographer Jeff Wall has written periodically on a variety of subjects--from the work of his Vancouver colleagues, to the art of such diverse figures as Edouard Manet, On Kawara, and Dan Graham, to the important role of photography in Conceptual art. Wall's own work takes center stage in the many interviews he has granted over the past two decades. Both the essays and the interviews are indispensable to the study of Wall's work, which will be the subject of a major American traveling retrospective, with stops in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, throughout 2007. Thanks to Wall's wide-ranging curiosity, nimble mind, and articulate voice, the texts are also of considerable interest outside of the context of his own oeuvre. This generous selection of 14 essays and 23 interviews from the past 25 years is the first collection of Wall's texts to be published in English, and as such, is an instant collector's item. This affordable volume also includes 120 black-and-white illustrations for reference purposes.