Jeff Wall: Time Stands Still. Photographs, 1980–2023

Jeff Wall (Vancouver, Canada, 1946) is recognised as one of the biggest names on the international visual arts scene in recent decades. Jeff Wall: Time Stands Still. Photographs, 1980–2023 is one of the largest of his exhibitions to date, comprising 63 photographs produced over more than forty years, including some of his early works presented in lightboxes—many of them on a large scale—throughout his creative career, Jeff Wall has produced around 200 photographs.

Since the 1970s, Jeff Wall's work has favoured the production of images that summon up situations and places that are both commonplace and symptomatic of everyday life. His subject matter ranges from everyday occurrences photographed in real places to imaginary situations constructed in a studio. The images often depict events the artist has witnessed and reconstructed in a process he calls “cinematography.” While working in photography, his work explores aesthetic and conceptual links with the fields of painting, literature, theatre and cinema, understood as correlative modes of representing and fictionalising reality. 

"His photographic tableaux are not intended to be seen as paintings—they are not, in fact, painted—but as images that combine and potentiate the close and continuing historical relationship between photography and painting at a time when both media are subject to extensive scrutiny", states the curator.

Over the past forty years, Jeff Wall’s pictures have been exhibited worldwide. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions in various institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), the Tate Modern (London), the Stedeljik Museum (Amsterdam), the Beyeler Foundation (Basel), and the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels). 

In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Prize, and several specialised magazines have named him one of the ten most important artists today. 

Watch the interview with the artist
Watch the interview with the artist reflecting on the exhibition process at MAAT. Jeff Wall talks about his journey and motivations, revealing the processes and stories behind some of his emblematic works, such as The Thinker, Actor in Two Roles, Gardens and The Flooded Grave.

“I let myself be open to the idea that something like a daydream or an intuition could be the origin of a construction, a picture construction. I wanted that because I felt—and still feel—that essentially what I do is compose.", says Wall.

Watch the full documentary here.  

Catalog coming soon
The catalog Jeff Wall: Time Stands Still. Photographs, 1980–2023, to be published during the exhibition, includes texts by Alexander Nagel, Sérgio Mah and Yves Abrioux, reproductions of the 63 works presented and views of the exhibition.