PHOTO:Jeff Wall-Appearance
As a major art figure in recent decades, Jeff Wall has developed a body of work that has profoundly changed the way we look at the photographic medium since the late 1970s. By inscribing it in an enlarged pictorial tradition and thinking of it in terms of its relations with other arts, he has redefined its essence and opened up possibilities.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthalle Mannheim Archive
Jeff Wall’s solo exhibition “Appearance” presents a cross-section of the artist’s work through a wide selection of photographs from the last fifteen years placed in dialogue with older pieces. This is the first special exhibition in the new Kunsthalle Mannheim. With 40 works in six rooms comprising 900 square meters, the exhibition explores the central elements in Wall’s oeuvre: the enigmatic and the grotesque, the relation of an image within an image, people in interiors, language and gestures, as well as role plays and interactions. The exhibition takes as starting point and guiding line from “Search of Premises” (2008) that was result of several months of working with a group of policemen, this photograph described by Jeff Wall as a “poem about intimacy” shows a search for clues in a domestic setting. Through its formal and narrative construction, it particularly embodies the dialectic between figuration and composition that has always been a feature of Jeff Wall’s work. The question of clues, intimately linked to the photographic medium, is combined with a more abstract reading of the work, as says the artist about the work. “I like the white and beige colours, the cutting of the walls, the nesting of forms”, It looks like a canvas by Mondrian. It’s like doing a painting with only three colors so you can focus on composition”. An important early work is “Picture for Women” (1979) that displays the artist’s photographic self-observation and self-depiction as central to the origins of his work. Through the prism of clues, intrigue, and the enigma of the image, the exhibition discusses, in an open-ended manner, various preoccupations that have figured the question of the mask and make-up as in “Band & Crowd” (2011), the figure in urban space: “In front of a night club” (2006), “The Thinker” (1986), the word and its relation to the “outside” of the image in “Monologue” (2013), literature in “After ‘Invisible Man” (1999-2000), “Picture for Women” (1979), and “View from an apartment” (2005). The exhibition is completed with new works showing scenes of costuming and masking, which reference Wall’s practice of staging as in “Mask Maker” (2015), and “Changing Room” (2014).
Info: Kunsthalle Mannheim, Friedrichsplatz 4, Mannheim, Duration 1/6-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, https://kuma.art
