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Jeff Wall, In front of a nightclub, 2006, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Wall, Boy Falling from Tree, 2010, Colour Photograph, 305,3 x 226 cm, Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Wall as Participant in Contextualizing His Own Exhibition

Jeff Wall, Overpass, 2001, Transparency in lightbox, 214 x 273.5 cm, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of the artist.

Heinrich Zille, Blick auf Fensterbrett im Hinterhof Fall, 1898, Gelatin silver print, Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur.

Jeff Wall, Insomnia, 1994, Transparency in lightbox, 172 x 213.5 cm, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Wall, The Thinker, 1986, Transparency in lightbox, 221 x 229 cm, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Wall, © Kirsten de Graaf – Rotterdam Dialoges: The artists – Witte de With, 2009.

Centre for Fine Arts
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23
+ 02 507 82 00
Brussels
Jeff Wall: The Crooked Path
May 27-November 9, 2011

Jeff Wall creates a dialogue between his own works and those of other historical and contemporary artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Carl Andre, Thomas Struth, David Claerbout and Andreas Gurski.

Jeff Wall is undoubtedly one of the artists who profoundly influenced the art of the last three decades. Since the late 1970s the Canadian artist — with his large-format photographs, displayed in light boxes — has set out to redefine the paradigms of photography. Since the early days of his career, his images, with their references to the history of art and more particularly to classical painting, have reflected his conviction that it is possible to maintain a certain continuity even within the canons of modernism and his belief in the possibility of "painting modern life."

The exhibition The Crooked Path looks at the context that favoured the development of Jeff Wall's oeuvre and seeks to present, via an extensive selection of his own works and those of other artists, a trajectory through the photographer's aesthetic concerns. The project explores the close interconnections between artist’s own creative process and the influences and questioning that have marked that process.

Those influences have been pictorial, photographic, cinematic, literary, and documentary, in addition to the theoretical positions adopted by Wall himself. The exhibition aims to throw light both on the internal logic of his work and on the aesthetic experiences that have guided his decisions and his work as a whole.

A great variety of themes that are integral to Wall's work are tackled in the exhibition: minimalism and the relation to "scale," historical photography, conceptual and post-conceptual photography, literature, documentary photography, and many others. To illustrate these themes the artist himself has chosen 25 of his works, from the 1970s to today; these make up the core of the exhibition. The positioning of these works will set up specific relations with a selection of other works selected by the exhibition's curators, Joël Benzakin and Jeff Wall himself. Visitors will be able to compare Jeff Wall's works with the works of other historical and contemporary artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Wols, Heinrich Zille, to artists closer to Wall's own generation, including Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler and others, and to a number of younger artists.

The Crooked Path, accordingly, offers the spectator a broad overview of the relationships, connections, suggestions, and confrontations between ca 130 works of art. With the participation of Jeff Wall, a "dialogue" will be established with works that have influenced his work directly or indirectly and created a favourable context for the development of his thinking and for the directions he has taken in his work. This approach will help to reveal the complexity and fertility of his creative output.

On the occasion of this exhibition a major catalogue will be published, whose original concept will be the direct result of the exhibition's "genesis" and will reflect its overall structure. Led by art historian Hans De Wolf numerous contributions by eminent specialists will embellish this publication which aims to be an innovative addition to the literature devoted to Jeff Wall.

The exhibition is produced by BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts and travels after Brussels to the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostella (Spain) where it will be held in autumn 2011.

Kai Althoff, Untitled, 2010, Oil, acrylic and varnish on wool, 132,1 x 121,9 cm, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

August Sander, from People of the 20th Century, Young Farmers, 1914, printed 1992, gelatin silver print, 26 x 18 cm, Die Photographische Sammlung, SK Stiffting Kultur, Cologne.

Frank Stella, Newstead Abbey, 1960, 301 x 183 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Mark Lewis Willesden, Laundrette; Reverse Dolly, Pan Right, Friday Prayers, 2010, © Mark Lewis Willesden, Courtesy the artist.

Jeff Wall, Tattoos and Shadows, 2000, Transparency in lightbox, 195.5 x 255 cm, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy of the artist.

Jeff Wall, After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 174 x 250.8 cm, Photograph Council Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel, and acquired through the generosity of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder and Carol and David Appelm, © Jeff Wall.

Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 229 x 377 cm, Tate, London. Purchased with the assistance from, the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund,© Jeff Wall.This work is one of Wall's earliest digital montages. It refers directly to a woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Wall transposes the nineteenth-century Japanese scene
to a contemporary cranberry farm near Vancouver. Amateur actors play the odd assortment of rural and city characters, surprised by the forces of nature. It required over 100 photographs, taken over the course of more than a year, to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.

Defying the Conventions of Photography in a Monumental Way

Jeff Wall, Men Waiting, 2007, transparency in lightbox, courtesy White Cube, London.

Jeff Wall, Rainfilled suitcase, 2001, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 25-3/8 x 31-1/2", Collection of the artist, © Jeff Wall.

Jeff Wall, An Octopus, 1990, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 71-5/8 x 90-3/16", © Jeff Wall.

Jeff Wall, Poppies in a garden, 2005, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 37-3/8 x 46-7/16", Collection of the artist, © Jeff Wall.

Jeff Wall, The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 89-15/16 x 111", © Jeff Wall.

Jeff Wall, Mimic, detail, 1982, Silver dye bleach transparency in light box, 198 x 228.5 cm, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto, © Jeff Wall.The large colour-print format that Wall favours requires a camera that is ill-suited to capturing fleeting moments, yet he wanted to explore the documentary style of street photography practiced by a number of photographers, such as Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand. Wall's solution was to restage such moments, preserving a sense of immediacy by using non-professional actors in real settings. He calls these constructed images 'cinematographic photographs'. In Mimic, the white man's "slant-eyes" gesture recreates a scene of racial abuse that Wall witnessed on a Vancouver street.

Jeff Wall, Doorpusher, 1984, Transparency in lightbox 2490 x 1220 mm, Goetz Collection, Munich, Cinematographic photograph, © The artist.

San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art
151 Third Street between
Mission and Howard streets
415-357-4000
San Francisco
Jeff Wall
October 27, 2007-
January 27, 2008

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946) is widely recognized as one of the most influential, adventurous, and inventive artists of his generation. Since 1978 he has worked principally with large-scale color photographs presented as transparencies in light boxes. His distinctive pictorial universe ranges from gritty realism to elaborate fantasy, drawing upon an unusually broad spectrum of sources that includes 19th-century painting, Conceptual art, narrative cinema, and modernist photography. The exhibition presents a selection of ambitious and celebrated works, including Picture for Women (1979); Mimic (1982); The Storyteller (1986); A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993); After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999-2000); Tattoos and Shadows (2000); and In front of a nightclub (2006), a newly promised gift to SFMOMA.

Jeff Wall, a retrospective survey of the artist's career from the late 1970s to the present was co-organized by SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra and Peter Galassi, chief curator of photography, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. The exhibition features some 40 of Wall's major light-box photographs and four black-and-white gelatin silver prints, tracing his principal themes and pictorial strategies.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives and works, Wall began painting and drawing seriously as a teenager. He studied art history at University of British Columbia, where he earned a master's degree in 1970 with a thesis on Dada in Berlin. At this time, Vancouver was rapidly becoming a vibrant artistic center, and by the late 1960s Wall's work was closely attuned to most recent developments in Minimalism and Conceptual art. In 1970 his Landscape Manual (1969-70), a 56-page black-and-white pamphlet of photographs and text, was exhibited at MoMA in Information, the influential survey of Conceptual art.

Wall was dissatisfied with his work at this time, however. He moved to London to pursue a doctorate in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and he soon stopped making art altogether. During his three years in London, he read widely in philosophy, the history and criticism of art and film, and the growing field of critical theory. He saw many films, and by the time he returned to Vancouver in the spring of 1973, he had decided to commit himself to filmmaking. Although he admired experimental cinema, his touchstone was postwar Neo-Realism in the broadest sense — films that used conventional narrative structures to deal imaginatively with everyday life.

Wall started teaching art and art history in 1974, and in 1976 he was appointed assistant professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver. None of his filmmaking projects had come to fruition, and he was eager to begin making art again. He had become close to the American artist Dan Graham and, like Graham, felt that the Conceptual art movement had reached an impasse. In the wake of the Conceptual art crisis, Wall aimed to rebuild the rebellious spirit of Modernism from the ground up. The distinctiveness of his art ever since has derived largely from the intensity with which he felt that mandate, his willingness to devote considerable resources of time and energy to entirely untested prospects, and his wide-ranging passion for and curiosity about images and ideas. The initial elements were certain aspects of cinema and painting, brought together in an unusual photographic medium.

Wall began working in the SFU studios, where, like a filmmaker, he could build sets, control lighting, rehearse actors, and otherwise create an entirely fictional image. He adopted the term cinematography to summarize his approach, which he believed could greatly enrich the potential of still photography. Another significant facet of Wall's new aesthetic was his sense that post-Renaissance painting could serve as a vital resource for contemporary art. On his first visit to the Museo del Prado in Madrid in the summer of 1977, he was deeply affected by the work of Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, and others, and he sought in his own art to emulate the commanding physical presence and pictorial power of Western painting's grand theater of human figures in action.

In Wall's view, color photography — then widely regarded as vulgar and commercial — was an ideal medium, in part because it distanced his work from the contemporaneous revival of figure painting that he regarded as a betrayal of avant-garde principles. Backlit transparencies had become common in advertising, and Wall embraced the commercial association as essential to the socially critical dimension of his art.

The initial phase of Wall's light-box work is represented in the exhibition by The Destroyed Room (1978), Picture for Women (1979), and Double Self-Portrait (1979). The first two works allude to famous 19th-century French paintings by Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, respectively, and were originally conceived to address the circumstance of women under capitalism. But the pictures' pictorial sources, as well as their critical goals, have been thoroughly transformed through a complex admixture of Conceptual strategies and political and theoretical concerns.

The first photographs Wall made outdoors, in 1980, were three panoramic landscapes — assertions that his art would not be limited to studio fictions. These straightforward views, like most of Wall's subsequent landscapes, belong to a photographic tradition of examining man's presence in the land. The genre is represented in the exhibition by Steves Farm, Steveston (1980); The Old Prison (1987); and Coastal Motifs (1989).

Wall also left the studio to make such works as Mimic (1982) and Milk (1984), both of which were inspired by incidents that he had observed on the street. He hired nonprofessional actors and restaged these incidents for the tripod-bound, large-format camera that he needed in order to produce images adequately rich in detail for his large transparencies. This way of working, combined with a focus on people at the margins of society, has shaped a central vein of Wall's art ever since. He summarized the program as "the painting of modern life," a phrase associated with the work of Manet and derived from a celebrated essay by Charles Baudelaire titled The Painter of Modern Life. In Milk, the liquid explosion caused by the man's abrupt gesture, set against the bleak geometry of the city, makes a vivid image of distress. As in Baudelaire's prose poems, the gritty reality of the street is transformed into a striking emblem of contemporary experience.

In the late 1980s Wall developed modern-life imagery in two pictures that take in a broad view and incorporate more characters: The Storyteller (1986) and An Eviction (1988; revised 2004). The first describes a gathering of indigent descendents of Canada's first peoples on the embankment of a highway overpass. Wall took the picture's theme and its title from an essay by Walter Benjamin that held up the premodern figure of the storyteller as an embodiment of, in Wall's words, "the memory of values excluded by capitalist progress." Although Wall has since questioned the socially progressive spirit of the picture, his photographs describing the marginal and dispossessed (e.g., Overpass, 2001) or acknowledge racial and ethnic diversity (e.g., Tran Doc Van, 1988/2003, and Tattoos and Shadows, 2000) have achieved sustained quality of genuine attention, unmarred by condescension or sentimentality.

In the early 1990s Wall's art developed in sharply divergent directions. One path led to fantastic and bizarre scenes, often created with the help of digital montage. The artist had observed the growing sophistication of digitally altered imagery, and when the tools reached the level required by his large photographs, he began to make use of them. Among the earliest works in which he did so is Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) (1992), in which slaughtered soldiers who mysteriously awaken respond to their deaths in different ways. More than 13 feet wide, the picture invests the grandeur of Napoleonic history painting and cinematic epics of war with a highly particular fantasy.

The following year Wall digitally composed another, equally ambitious picture, but of a very different kind. A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993) transposes a scene from a 19th-century Japanese print into a cranberry bog outside Vancouver. Wall was fascinated by the challenge of recreating the print's striking visual impression of an invisible natural force.

The light-hearted A Sudden Gust of Wind couldn't be more different from Dead Troops Talk, or from the other new branch of imagery that Wall had initiated. At the same time that he was testing the limits of fantasy, Wall explored modern photographic traditions that he once challenged. Some Beans and An Octopus (both 1990) and subsequent figureless pictures made both in- and outdoors embrace photography's fundamental capacity to transform fact into pictorial poetry.

In 1993 — the same year he made A Sudden Gust of Wind — Wall made Restoration, a tour de force of photographic description that adopts a narrow panoramic form as if in emulation of its subject: a vast, walk-in panorama painted in the late 19th century that in the early 1990s was in the first stages of being restored. From a position near the edge of the circular interior, the picture takes in a sweep of 180 degrees to revel in the interplay between surface and depth, between painterly and photographic description.

In 1996 Wall deepened his rapprochement with photographic tradition by beginning to work in black and white. Most of his pictures in that medium have been drawn from everyday life, including all four of the monochrome works that are presented together in a single gallery in the exhibition. The most significant new note here is the gloom and murk of darkness, luxuriously rendered in Night (2001).

If many contemporary photographers regard black-and-white imagery as hopelessly antiquated, artists in general might agree that illustrations of novels have been definitively relegated to the past. Wall's explorations of the latter domain consequently exemplify his distinctive ability to marshal the neglected past in the service of an uncharted future. The exhibition includes two such pictures. One makes gloriously visible the protagonist of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, composing the novel itself in an underground lair illuminated by 1,369 light bulbs. The other is a small, seductive image (printed in 2005), drawn from Yukio Mishima's novel Spring Snow.

The exhibition is accompanied by two publications. Jeff Wall includes color plates of all the works in the exhibition; an interview with the artist by James Rondeau, curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago; and a richly illustrated essay by Galassi that traces the evolution of Wall's work and links his originality to the breadth and complexity of his artistic and intellectual interests. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews is the first collection of Wall's essays and interviews to be published in English. The subjects of Wall's essays range from the work of Edouard Manet, On Kawara, and Dan Graham to the role of photography in Conceptual art. Both books are distributed through D.A.P. in the United States and Canada and through Thames & Hudson outside of North America and are available at SFMOMA MuseumStore or online at www.sfmoma.org.

Jeff Wall, Restoration, detail, 1993; Silver dye bleach transparency in light box; 46-7/8 x 16 ft. 7/8", The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Mary Joy Thomson Legacy; © 2006 Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patro Near Moquor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), 1992, Transparency in lightbox, © Jeff Wall.