Galerie Greta Meert

Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Jeff Wall. Comprising both new and earlier photographs spanning the artist’s career, this exhibition is Wall’s first presentation at the gallery since 1991.

From documentary and ‘near documentary’ photographs to the ambitious productions of his cinematographic pictures, Jeff Wall’s repertoire allows him to explore the in-betweens of picture-making granted by a prolonged observation of everyday life. Through his sustained engagement with the pictorial form of the tableau—from transparencies in lightboxes to silver gelatin prints—the artist continues to expand the notion of photography as art by simultaneously addressing its specificities and its complex kinship to other forms of art and means of depiction. As written by Aaron Peck, for Wall “photography becomes a way, through the legacy of the avant-garde, to further the project of the depictive arts, which, by an accident of their nature, document the spirit and details of the time in which a particular artwork is composed.”

In planning this exhibition, Wall considered the inevitable repetitions that occur when working in pictorial form. By acknowledging the return of certain themes throughout his work, he paradoxically reinforces the singularity of the tableau. For instance, inMonologue (2013), Listener (2015), and in his more recent Event (2020), where two men at a formal gathering are
engaged in a confrontation, the artist captures the act of talking - an element that evades photography and therefore shows a limit.

In Wall’s lexicon, these scenes constitute occurrences, a wide category of pictures that contrast with non-occurrences as exemplified by the many landscapes presented in this exhibition, including Rock surface 1 & 2 (2007), and Hillside near Ragusa (2007).