Contemporary Art Gallery

JEFF WALL

December 13 (Sat.),1997,to March 22 (Sun.),1998

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Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito

The Jeff Wall Exhibition is currently being held at the Contemporary Art Gallery of the Art Tower Mito (ATM), in Mito (Ibaraki Pref.). This full-scale solo exhibition of the artist's works is the only Japanese leg of an international tour that has also gone to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The exhibition has been planned with the cooperation with the Los Angeles museum.

In the past two years, the Japanese public has had the occasion to get to know several works by this Canadian-born artist, as he participated in group exhibitions held at the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. The exhibition this time, however, is an extensive retrospective, collecting two decades of Wall's masterpieces from major museums and private collections worldwide. The 30 works (37 single pieces) displayed here -- ranging from "The Destroyed Room" to the latest monochrome pieces -- testify to the artist's penetrating eye toward "the society where we live, and our present and future."

Wall creates his works using actors and actresses on location, as in a movie production, and uses a computer to construct elaborate scenes. Just as painters of past ages composed and depicted historic scenes, landscapes and fashions, Wall portrays our present age fully applying his knowledge of art history and photography. In 1993, for instance, influenced by the Japanese woodblock artist, Katsushika Hokusai, he produced "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)," a portrait of modern times modeled after "Sunshu Ejiri," one of "The 36 Views of Mt. Fuji." The work, which seems to have frozen a scene of a film or a phase of an everyday episode, stimulates our imagination to invent our own story.

In 1978, Jeff Wall produced the powerful "The Destroyed Room" -- the first time he used a light box covered with a color transparency, as in a Japanese subway wall advertisement -- giving it an appeal in the style of advertising. The work, which the artist arranged as elaborately as a stage set, recreates a vandalized private room.

After graduating from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Wall studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He continually posed himself the question of how an artist could create an intense impression, in the fashion of Goya or Manet, by depicting the current age. He also asked himself what kind of work would be significant for our modern society. One answer to these questions was his idea of using fluorescent light boxes with photographs, thus hitting on a new way of expression. As he put it, "It is not photography, cinema, painting, or propaganda -- though it has strong associations with them all."

Since then, Wall has continued to picture his hometown, Vancouver, urban life, his stressed-out contemporaries' psychological conflict and other objects mirroring the society in which we live. His international reputation is that of a storyteller for our age.

Several works in the current exhibition are especially important: "The Destroyed Room" (1978, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), "Woman and Her Doctor" (1980-81, private collection) "The Storyteller" (1986, Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main), "Dead Troops Talk" (1992, private collection), and "A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai)" (1993, Tate Gallery, London). Visit the gallery and you will thoroughly enjoy a landscape, a street event, a fantasy, modern people's mental distortion and everything that Jeff Wall has expressed in his career, from the earliest work of 1978 to the latest monochrome pieces.