Jeff Wall. Possible Tales, curated by Jean-François Chevrier with the artist, is on view until October 13 in Barcelona’s La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. 35 photographic tableaux reflect a body of work characterized by an extraordinary diversity of subjects, formats, tonalities and registers, between documentary description and fiction, or possible tales. Possible Tales is the first exhibition to offer such a comprehensive overview of Jeff Wall’s work in Spain.
Belying the notion of photography as a prolific art form, Jeff Wall (b. 1946) has produced “only” two hundred images since 1978 (the date of the picture he now considers his first): an average of four or five a year. He has always worked piece by piece, emphasizing the autonomy of the tableau form. Each new image adds to an increasing complex open network of subjects, motifs and figures, enriched by the interplay of echoes and analogies. Between the two poles of what he terms “cinematographic” and “documentary”, a network of narratives and motifs has formed, crisscrossing the iconographic repertoires and genres of the pictorial tradition.
Since the 1980s, the work of Canadian artist Jeff Wall has largely contributed to defining or redefining photography as a full part of contemporary art. His practice of the photographic picture inherits from the history of painting its key principle: composition. Formed piece by piece, the ensemble is both dense and extremely varied, crossed by recurrences and intersecting themes, with an acute sense of enigma. All images are part of a wide range of registers and modes of expression, from pure description to beginnings of possible tales.
The earliest work in the exhibition, Steves Farm, Steveston, a landscape from 1980, depicts a semi-rural site in the Greater Vancouver area; it corresponds to a documentary orientation. The most recent work (Maquette for a monument / to the contemplation / of the possibility of mending / a hole in a sock, 2023), through allegory, belongs to the “cinematographic” mode: those images are carefully staged, sometimes to the point of producing a hallucinatory or marvellous world. A number of pictures partake of an intermediate, “near documentary” register.
Jeff Wall : Possible Tales
Until October 13, 2024
La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
Palau de la Virreina
La Rambla, 99.
08002 Barcelona, Spain
https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/lavirreina/en
Public conversation between Jeff Wall and Jean-François Chevrier, recorded on the day of the inauguration:
