Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall
February 23 - March 31, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, February 23, 6–8 pm

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Jeff Wall which will open on February 23rd and will be on view through March 31st.

The gallery exhibition will run concurrently with a retrospective survey of Jeff Wall's work from the late 1970s to the present at The Museum of Modern Art, which opens to the public on February 25th.

On view at the gallery will be eight new back-lit transparency works made over the past two years which will be exhibited in the North Gallery. They include In front of a nightclub (2006), Rear-view, open air theater (2005), A woman consulting a catalogue (2005); Card players (2006); Poppies in a garden (2004); Blind window 3 (2006); and Basin in Rome I and II (2003).

In these new works Jeff Wall portrays moments of modern life, continuing his investigation of the intersection between reality and invention and the realist potential of picture making, from the 'near-documentary' to the reconstructed mise en scene.

In his own words: "[I]..make photographs that put documentary photography's factual claim in suspension, while still creating an involvement with factuality for the viewer. I [try] to do this in part through emphasizing the relations photography has with other picture making arts, mainly painting and cinema, in which the factual claim has always been played with in a subtle, learned and sophisticated way." – Jeff Wall, in Three Thoughts on Photography , 1999, reprinted in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonne, 1978-2004, Schaulager, Basel, 2005).

The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art will include some forty works spanning Jeff Wall's career. The show is co-curated by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA, and Neal Benezra, Director, SF MoMA. It will open to the public on February 25th and will run through May 14th, followed by a tour to The Art Institute of Chicago, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this fall. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Peter Galassi and an interview by James Rondeau, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. A book of Jeff Wall's collected writings and interviews is being published simultaneously by MoMA to coincide with the exhibition.

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1948, 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 1970-1973. He is the recipient of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize for the Visual Arts, 2003, Zurich, Switzerland; the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography, Ontario Arts Council, Canada, 2001; and the Erna and Victor Hasselblad International Award in Photography, Gotteborg, Sweden, 2002.

A major retrospective of his work, Jeff Wall, Photographs 1978-2004, was seen in 2005 at the Schaulager, Basel, and for this exhibition, a catalogue raisonne was published. A related, but revised exhibition later traveled to the Tate Modern, London, and for the exhibition a complementary catalogue was published by the Tate. Over the past decade solo exhibitions have been held at the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich; MUMOK (Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation), Vienna; Museum fur Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt; Mies Van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona; Musee d'art contemporain, Montreal; Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

Please join us at the opening reception for the artist on Friday, February 23rd, from 6 – 8 p.m.