Jeff Wall

* 1946, lives in Vancouver/Canada. Wall first studied art history, but soon began working as an artist alongside pursuing his theoretical activities. Since 1997 he presents large-format photographs in back-lit display cases. Walls calls himself, after Baudelaire, a ‹painter of modern life› and often bases the composition and contents of his images on nineteenth-century realism or the paintings of Eduard Manet.
Wall prepares his staged photographs well in advance: the scenes are casted with actors, copied photographically, and sometimes assembled or digitally post-processed. At first glance the images are often thoroughly unspectacular and divulge their complex structure only after a longer viewing. Walls concerns himself with visual symbols of modern life, which include forms of urban landscapes as an expression of ailing social structures.