Jeff Wall: “Parent Child”, 2018. ©Jeff Wall.
Jeff Wall’s first exhibition with Gagosian Gallery Gagosian Gallery announces Jeff Wall’s first exhibition with the gallery. The majority of the works included are on view for the first time. April 30–June 22, 2019]]>
Source: Gagosian Gallery
From his pioneering use in the 1970s of backlit color transparencies—a medium then synonymous with advertising—to his intricately constructed scenes of enigmatic incidents from daily life, literature, and film, Wall has expanded the definition of the photograph, both as object and illusion.
The triptych “I giardini/The Gardens (2017) was photographed in the gardens of the Villa Silvio Pellico in Moncalieri, outside of Turin, Italy. Though Wall has made several works that combine two or more images, this is the first in which the order, read from left to right, represents a passage of time. It therefore has a narrative aspect absent from any previous picture group. The three images—individually titled “Appunto/Complaint”, “Disappunto/Denial”, and “Diffida/Expulsion” order—trace the relations between either two or four characters through three depicted moments.
Landscapes are the subject of three more works. “Hillside, Sicily, November 2007” (2007), one of two black-and-white images in the exhibition, shows the dry, rocky landscape of the eastern part of the Italian island; and an olive orchard has risen out of the dry desert in “Daybreak (on an olive farm/Negev Desert/Israel)” (2011), where we see Bedouin harvest workers about to awake and begin their workday. The only human structure on the Sicilian hillside is the remnant of a small stone shelter; on the horizon behind the olive orchard stands one of the largest prisons in Israel. With its flat, vibrant colors resembling a painting more than a photograph, “Recovery” (2017-2018) is set in a seaside park on another summer afternoon. One figure separates himself from the fantasy: a young man sitting on the grass, looking out of the composition, up and away. Is the image a blissful momentary vision occasioned by his recovery from some temporary misfortune? Recovery recalls Wall’s previous experiments with hallucinatory moments in works such as “Dead Troops Talk” (1992) or “The Flooded Grave” (2000).
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