Jeff Wall OC

2008 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts

Jeff Wall is one of the world’s most influential contemporary artist. Known for his large-scale back-lit photographs, he blends elements of cinema, literature and painting into a complex mode he calls “cinematography”.

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia where he continues to live and work. As an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia in 1970, he experimented with conceptual art but stopped making art the same year. From 1970 to 1973, Jeff Wall studied with Manet expert, T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute in London. He returned to making art in 1977 when he produced his first backlit photo-transparencies.

Jeff Wall’s pictures range from direct reportage to elaborate compositions that often allude to historical artists such as Velazquez, Hokusai, and Manet. His photos capture scenes of people engaged in everyday life against the backdrop of Vancouver’s increasingly urbanizing landscape.

Jeff Wall distinguishes between documentary style pictures from staged cinematographic pictures. Since the early 1990’s, he has used digital postproduction techniques to superimpose different images and create a singular unified photograph. A Sudden Gust of Wind, 1993, is a well known example of his cinematography and composition. The picture recreates the 19th century woodblock print by Katushika Hokusai, in contemporary British Columbia. The seemingly candid photo is actually a composition comprising of 100 photos which took a year to produce.

In 2002, Jeff Wall was honoured with the Hasselblad Award. In 2006 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2007 he was awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement. His works have been exhibited all throughout the world and is collected by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Audain Art Museum.