Over the course of Jeff Wall’s career, his versatile and disciplined approach to the possibilities of the medium of photography to ‘paint modern life’ has resulted in a body of work notable in its attention to composition, scale, color and construction and for its hybrid integration of the documentary and the cinematographic, the ‘street’ and the monumental, two directions he has pursued simultaneously, while being partial to neither.
‘The Crooked Path’ , an exhibition that surveys Jeff Wall’s work from the seventies to today in conjunction with the work of fifty-nine other artists, has just opened at the CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and will be on view until February 28, 2012. The exhibition was organized by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and opened there in spring of this year.
Jeff Wall’s work has been seen in a number of large solo exhibitions over the past few years. These include ‘Transit’ at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, in Dresden in 2010, and ‘Jeff Wall: Exposure’, a special commissioned exhibition of new black & white works in conjunction with earlier works, at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin in 2007. That same year an important retrospective featuring a selection of over 40 works, was shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and travelled to The Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2005, ‘Jeff Wall, Photographs 1978-2004’ was seen at the Schaulager, Munchenstein, Basel, for which a catalogue raisonné was published. A related, revised exhibition was shown at Tate Modern, London, for which a complementary catalogue was also published.
