Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall: New Works, Part I
February 21 - March 17, 2001
Opening Reception: Wednesday, February 21, 6-8 pm

The Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the Canadian artist Jeff Wall. The exhibition will take place in two parts. Part I will open to the public on Wednesday, February 21st, from 6 to 8 pm, and will be on view through Saturday, March 17th. Part II will open to the public on Wednesday, March 21st , from 6 to 8 pm, and will be on view through Saturday, April 14th. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm.

Jeff Wall is one of the most seminal and influential figures working in photography in the past twenty-five years. In carrying forth the quest for a new method of representation, one which offers an alternative path to painting and filmmaking, he has opened vast new fields of exploration for himself and for countless others who have been influenced by his work .

During Part I and Part II of this exhibition, Jeff Wall will show a total of nine new backlit lightbox works made over the past two years. Part I will present The Flooded Grave (1998-2000), one of his most ambitious and technologically complex pieces to date. In the tradition of the artist's elaborately staged tableaux, this picture shows a freshly dug grave in a desolate cemetery that has been flooded with sea life. In Jeff Wall's own words, "The Flooded Grave takes place on a typical, rainy Vancouver day. The rain has just stopped. An open hole dug in the ground has been flooded, and for the moment, the grave has turned into the sea. I wanted it to be as if someone was walking their dog in the cemetery, gazed into the water and had a daydream that would disappear in a moment. It's a purely imaginary vision that could never actually be photographed." Accompanying The Flooded Grave will be three other new works, Peas and Sauce (2000), A Sapling Supported by a Post (2000), and Cut Branches, East Cordova Street, Vancouver (1999). All three portray lone, banal images, from nature or daily life, which represent the easily disregarded minutia or detritus in encounters with the everyday.

In Part II of the exhibition five other new works will be on view: Tattoos and Shadows (2000), Man with a Rifle (2000), Diagonal Composition 3 (2000), and Blind Window I and II (2000). Tattoos and Shadows and The Man with a Rifle are cinematic mise-en-scènes, the former echoing the tradition of Impressionist painting; the latter a staged event which recalls Wall's signature narrative dramas of suburban and urban life. The theme of volatile social drama and the critical edge between fact and fiction are both evident in The Man with a Rifle in that the subject of the image --a man engaged in a street-fight -- is portrayed with neither an accomplice, an adversary, nor a gun. Blind Window and Diagonal Composition both emphasize the arrangement of formal elements and the insistent presence of ordinary things.

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1946, where he still lives. He received his MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia in 1970, and did doctoral research towards a PhD in Art History at the Courtauld Institute at the University of London from 1970-73. In the late 1970s he turned to back-lit color photography and since then has been known for his large-format photographic transparencies mounted on lightboxes, which often feature tableaux of staged events and involve an elaborate production process drawn from filmmaking. Interested in the intersection between art history, photography, history painting, cinema, social documentary, and pop culture, he has worked in both color and black & white photography to achieve these ends, which are always rich in possible interpretations. The instant, the scenario, and the possibility of a before and after of an imaginary event form the basis of his picture making.

Jeff Wall has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, at such institutions as the Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona; the Musée d'art contemporain, Montreal; the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington,D.C.; the Art Tower, Mito, Japan; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, and numerous others. In 1993 he exhibited The Children's Pavilion, a collaborative work with Dan Graham, at the Museum Boyman's van Beuningen, Rotterdam. His work has been included in such group exhibitions as: Beauté in Fabula at the Palais des Papes, Avignon; Seeing Time: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Carnegie International 1999, Pittsburgh; The Museum as Muse, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 10 (1997); Hall of Mirrors: Art & Film since 1945, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Biennial (1995); Post Human, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; and Passages de l'image, Centre Pompidou,Paris. Upcoming will projects include a solo show, Change of Scene, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, in September 2001. Jeff Wall's work is the subject of numerous publications, including the following recent monographs: Jeff Wall: Oeuvres 1990-96 (Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, 1999); Jeff Wall (Phaidon, London, 1996, reprinted 1998); and Jeff Wall (Whitechapel, London; MCA Chicago; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1995).