PHOTO: Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall’s work synthesizes the essentials of photography with elements from other art forms, including painting, cinema, and literature, in a complex mode that he calls “cinematography.” His pictures range from classical reportage to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at the larger scale traditionally identified with painting.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Jeff Wall’s solo exhibition in New York includes five new pictures and several not previously seen in the United States. Wall connects photography with elements of painting, cinema, and literature in pictures that range from classic reportage to elaborate constructions. Some images emphasize what the artist calls “blatant artifice,” while others are made simply, spontaneously, and directly. Wall favors no particular approach and has explored the breadth and complexity of photography for several decades. A number of works in the exhibition are what Wall calls “near documentary” images, which may resemble snapshots but are made in collaboration with people who appear in them. This group includes two full-length portraits, “Young man wet with rain” (2011) and “Portrait in Noto”, which was photographed in 2007 during a visit to Sicily, but printed only this year. “Fallen rider”, made in summer 2022, derives from an event witnessed by a friend thirty years ago; Wall recovered the memory of this account and reconstructed it near the place where it apparently occurred. Also on view are “Echo Park” (2023), an image made in Los Angeles, and three early landscapes, “Steves Farm, Steveston”; “The Bridge” and “The Jewish Cemetery” (all 1980), which have not previously been shown together in the United States. Each of the earlier works depicts an area of urban or suburban settlement in the artist’s Vancouver birthplace. Steves Farm is Wall’s first documentary photograph, while Echo Park is his largest cityscape to date. Two other new pictures move into realms of the imaginary. “Maquette for a monument / to the contemplation / of the possibility of mending / a hole in a sock” (2023) shows a woman holding a needle and the titular garment while seated in what appears to be a bookstore. The scene’s dreamlike quality positions it as an allegory for the impulse to repair and restore—or not. Informant: “An occurrence not described in chapter 6, part 3 of Últimas tardes con Teresa by Juan Marsé” (2023) was commissioned by the city of Barcelona for the project “Unknown City Beneath the Mist. New images from Barcelona’s Peripherie0”s at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2024–25). The work was inspired by Marsé’s 1966 novel, whose title translates to “Last Afternoons with Teresa”, which is set in mid-century Barcelona as observed in part from the city’s geographical and societal hinterlands. It represents one of a small number of pictures in Wall’s oeuvre that are based on literary sources, embodying a researched approach to an imagined scene and reviving the socially critical stance of his earliest projects. A second image, inset into the larger one, shows that the young woman depicted in the photograph is on the phone with a police officer. Another work occupies a zone somewhere between the documentary and the imaginary. “In the Legion” (2022) shows the busy interior of an aging tavern and the interactions of its patrons, including a man captured amid what looks to be an impromptu backflip. Like “Fallen rider”, this may be a reconstruction of an event witnessed by the artist, or may derive from another source, or from some fusion of the two approaches, since Wall has always claimed complete freedom in the conceiving and making of his photographs.
Photo: Jeff Wall, Fallen rider, 2022. Inkjet print, 74 ⅞ × 98 ⅞ inches (190 × 251 cm), edition of 3 + 1 AP, © Jeff Wall, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration 8/11-21/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/
