Jeff Wall
Visibility
12 September 2013–25 January 2014
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Lilly & Yoel Moshe Elstein Multi-Purpose Gallery
Herta and Paul Amir Building
27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard
Tel Aviv 61332
Hours: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday 10–16h;
Tuesday, Thursday 10–22h; Friday 10–14h
T +972 (0) 3 6077020
Curator: Nili Goren
Jeff Wall is one of the most important and fascinating artists working in photography today, and undoubtedly one of those responsible for positioning photography at the forefront of the contemporary art scene. His work has influenced many artists and helped shape the contemporary critical discourse on photography. In the last three decades, Wall has presented numerous exhibitions, including retrospectives at Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art comprises works from his early days to the present, in a variety of techniques. Some works are street photography in a “near-documentary” style, and some present complex art-historical and cultural references. Others are staged or reconstructed photographs in a “cinematographic” style, which blurs the distinction between the commonplace and the spectacular and between the documentary and the fantastic, vacillating between the darkness of film noir and an everyday simplicity. In addition to a large selection of Wall’s well-known works—which are often composed of a multiplicity of staged scenes painstakingly processed to create a large-scale image in a light box—the exhibition also features color and black-and-white photographs made mainly in the last decade. These impressive large prints, measuring up to three meters and more in remarkable photographic realism, offer a unique viewing experience.
Wall’s subversion of artistic conventions and accepted generic photographic forms is to a certain extent a realization of the role assigned by Charles Baudelaire to the artist as “the painter of modern life,” who reflects life as it is and distills eternal beauty from the transitory. Wall refers to the passing moment and to everyday life, but despite his pictures’ direct appearance they are not images of a “decisive moment.” His avoidance of the clichés of documentary photography underlies his “near-documentary” style. It also informs his “cinematographic” practice, which involves a meticulous reconstruction of situations evoked from memory and of past impressions. In these works, Wall draws attention to both the mental and technical processing of the image, emphasizing its distance from automatic or casual perception.
Research for the catalogue and its publication in cooperation with the Shpilman Institute for Photography.
The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Sidney Simchowitz and the Simchowitz family; with the assistance of UBS and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
