PHOTO:Jeff Wall-New Works

Jeff Wall has exhibited his photographs internationally for the twenty-five years and is one of the most influential artists working today. He has also played a key role in establishing photography as a contemporary art form. This month two exhibitions of new works by Jeff Wall are on presentation at the Marian Goodman Gallery in N. York and London.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

Highly respected for pioneering a hybrid form of picture making which has influenced a generation, Jeff Wall’s work combines formal innovation with a discerning reflection on and research into conditions and social interactions in the real world. His pictures may depict an instant and a scenario, but the before and after that moment are left completely unknown, allowing them to remain open to multiple interpretations. From the beginning he has merged the pictorial tradition with photography and cinema, beginning in 1978 with large format color transparency works, then introducing black & white works and later color prints. The exhibitions in New York and London offer a close look at the artist’s most recent body of work, continuing and extending a process spanning close to four decades in a disciplined quest for a new form of representation based on the idea of everyday life. By integrating, truth and artifice, the street and the studio, documentary and the cinematographic, Jeff Wall engages in a boundless exploration of open and closed spaces and the relationships between them, rendering his subjects through a selective strategy of reportage or construction, while being partial to neither.

Info: Marian Goodman Gallery N. York, 24 West 57th Street, New York, Duration: 20/10-19/12/15, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00 & Marian Goodman Gallery London, 5-8 Lower John Str., London, Duration: 30/10-19/12/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://mariangoodman.com