Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall est l’un des plus grands photographes contemporains canadiens. Il s’inspire de la photographie documentaire pour amener le spectateur à modifier sa perception de la réalité.

Jeff Wall est né à Vancouver où il étudie puis enseigne l’histoire de l’art après une thèse sur le mouvement dada. Lors d’un voyage en Europe il découvre la peinture de Vélasquez et la réflexion sur la représentation qu’elle implique et il décide de traiter les grands problèmes picturaux traditionnels par des moyens en adéquation avec notre époque. Ses photographies font souvent référence à des toiles célèbres de Manet, de Delacroix, de Géricault, ou encore de Watteau. Ainsi, la photographie lui permet de « peindre la vie moderne ». Ces images sont souvent qualifiées de photographies documentaires donnant l’illusion d’un cliché tiré de la « réalité ».

English
Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he has lived and worked with the exception of periods of residence in London, England between 1970 and 1973, and in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1974-75.

Wall has practiced and studied art since childhood. From 1964 to 1970, he studied art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. During these years he practiced painting and sculpture and experimented with the new art forms characteristic of the 1960s, making monochrome paintings and ephemeral installations that showed an affinity with minimal and conceptual art. He became seriously interested in photography in 1967. For his M.A. in Art History (1970), he wrote a thesis on aspects of the Dada movement. He participated in his first exhibition in Vancouver in 1969.

From 1970 to 1973, Wall did postgraduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He worked on John Heartfield and Marcel Duchamp, and read widely in the history of art, cinema and photography.

He completed little work as a fine artist between 1971 and 1977, when he began to make the photographs for which he has become known.

Wall was a member of the faculty at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1974-75, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver from 1976 to 1987, and the University of British Columbia from 1987 to 1999.

He has received many honours, including the Munich Art Prize (1997), the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2002) and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, Zurich (2003).

Jeff Wall has exhibited his pictures internationally for the past 25 years.Recent solo exhibits include Jeff Wall Tableaux at the Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art, Oslo, Jeff Wall Photographs at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna and Jeff Wall Landscapes at the Manchester City Art Gallery.