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Born in Vancouver in 1946, Wall began drawing and painting at an early age. In the mid-1960s, he studied art history at the University of British Columbia while continuing to make art, inspired by the emerging Conceptual art movement and its anti-capitalist creed: to decouple art from aesthetic and market value.
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 ...
- Summary of Jeff Wall
- Accomplishments
- Biography of Jeff Wall
Known as both an artist and art historian, Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer and writer whose work simultaneously showcases and challenges some of the most dominant assumptions about art and art-making. Since in the late 1970s, Wall has created large-scale photographs that recall the imagery, subject matter, construction, and display methods of ...
Wall carefully stages the scenes he photographs, intricately designing every detail to achieve his desired visual effects. Ironically, the final images often appear to be mid-action, spontaneous, a...In Wall's earliest photographs of the late 1970s and 1980s, clear references are made to some of the most famous paintings in the history of art since the Renaissance. Wall admits that in nodding t...Rather than emphasizing the intimacy that photographs can carry through their small sizes and abilities to capture fond, personal memories, Wall challenges this intimacy by making his photographs l...Childhood
Jeff Wall was on born September 29, 1946, in Vancouver, Canada. He describes his parents as not "hugely interested in the art thing," but they did have a monthly subscription to the Abrams Art Book Series of full-color monographs on master painters, such as Cézanne and Rembrandt. These books influenced Wall throughout his childhood, introducing him to the most prominent artists throughout history and showing him how these artists explored the boundaries of various painting styles and artistic...
Early Training and Work
After high school, Wall studied art history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he met his future wife, Jeannette, originally from England. After reading Sol LeWitt's Paragraphs on Conceptual Artfrom 1967, Wall responded to LeWitt's claim that good Conceptual art depended on the quality of the idea behind it. Wall stopped painting and drawing, choosing instead to take what he calls "pseudo-conceptual" photographs with a point-and-shoot Nikon F camera given to him by his fa...
Mature Period
In 1977, Wall returned to art making, stimulated by returning to where he had first played with painting in his youth. Now he negotiated the terms of painting, photography, and film in his new works, producing large "cinematographic" and "near-documentary" photographs in which he re-staged scenes that he had encountered in his life and included overt references to the modern art masterpieces he revered. The photographic images were installed in backlit lightboxes, accentuating the visual deta...
- Canadian
- September 29, 1946
- Vancouver, Canada
View Jeff Wall’s 222 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. See available photographs, prints and multiples, and sculpture for sale and learn about the artist.
- Canadian
Artistic practice. Exhibitions. Recognition. Influence. Bibliography. Notes. References. Further reading. External links. Jeff Wall. Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian photographer. He is artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing.
- Photographer
- Vancouver School
- Hasselblad Award (2002)
Dec 2, 2021 · His art is to move photographs into the realm of painting. Glenstone Museum outside of Washington, D.C. is showing a retrospective of Wall's photographs. Since the 1970s, he's influenced...
May 15, 2019 · Jeff Wall Takes Photography Into a Painterly Realm The conceptual photographer’s transfixing show at Gagosian includes confounding diptychs and a cinematic triptych. Share full article
