ART CITIES:Athens-Jeff Wall

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 Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The George Economou Collection Archive

From his pioneering use in the 1970s of backlit color transparencies, a medium then synonymous with advertising, to his intricately constructed scenes of enigmatic incidents from daily life, literature, and film, Wall has expanded the definition of the photograph, both as object and illusion. In the first solo exhibition in Greece of Jeff Wall that is on show at The George Economou Collection, works from the late 1980s to the 2010s are arranged in three groupings, reflecting Wall’s involvement with different historical genres, installed in a dramaturgical unfolding over the three floors of galleries. A verdant street view that captures Wall’s native Vancouver opens the exhibition, exemplifying the artist’s reimagining of the beauty and sublime of the natural landscape by paying equally close attention to signifiers of modern life: roads, ports, prisons, and tract houses. In the same gallery is the key piece “An Eviction” (1988/2004), which depicts a charged scene of human conflict against a sprawling vista of Vancouver’s suburbia. This work, which is in the George Economou Collection, marks the first time Wall used digital tools to re-edit the large-scale photographic image “Eviction Struggle” (1988), adding figures and elements from other photographs taken during the shoot, but not used. On the second floor, an ensemble of photographic prints surveys the work Wall has been making since suspending his production of transparencies in 2007. Three of the works, including the portrayals of two Vancouver costume historians and collectors, thematize clothing and its history. By contrast, “Summer Afternoons” (2013) is one of the artist’s few treatments of the nude figure. As Jeff Wall says “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”. The exhibition concludes with a group of lightbox tableaux from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Works such as “Insomnia” (1994) and “After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue” (1999–2000) are some of Wall’s most iconic images.

Cover Photo: Jeff Wall, An Eviction, 1988/2004, Transparency in lightbox, 229 × 414 cm, Courtesy the artist

Info: Curators: Philipp Kaiser and Skarlet Smatana, The George Economou Collection, 80 Kifissias Avenue, Marousi, Athens, Duration: 18/6/2019-April 2020, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.thegeorgeeconomoucollection.com