Jeff Wall can be seen as one of the great artists of our time. For Jeff Wall is the technique and the material of enormous importance. He not only stressed this in his essays and interviews, but also in his works. It is therefore not possible to really know the work of Jeff Wall without understanding the way he works.
Many artists from the fifties and later started using techniques that not only belonged to the art such as welding from the metal industry and from the automotive industry. Jeff Wall started using the lightboxes used for advertising.
A lightbox is really nothing more than a large tank full of lights on one side with a white layer. On this layer he stuck this so-called transparencies. The result is similar to the advertising that we often encounter in bus shelters.
At the end of the 80s, when the computers for the first time could produce 16 million colors, he started digitizing work to photo collages as Dead Troops Talk.
Read an interview with Jeff Wall and he always mentions one or several paintings that he is somewhere in the world has seen. He wanted to be a painter but he had more talent for photography. It is in this respect is not very remarkable that he worked more like a painter than as a photographer. His works are often based on masterpieces from the 19th century and often they seem to register everyday situations, a better look at the works leads to the understanding that these works are carefully composed. The figures in his work are not random passers but actors and models and the scenes are extremely carefully designed. Besides obvious art-historical references about his work with social criticism inspired by the members of the Frankfurter schule.
Download a 13-minute movie of Jeff Wall here:
