PinchukArtCentre presents a lecture by Jeff Wall to be given on February 4

The beauty of photography is rooted in the great collage wich everyday life is, a combination of absolutely concrete and specific things created by no-one and everyone, all of which becomes available once it is unified into a picture”.

Jeff Wall interviewed by Arielle Pélenc, Phaidon 1996

The PinchukArtCentre invites the public to a lecture by Jeff Wall, held as part of his first solo exhibition in Eastern Europe “Jeff Wall. In light, black, colour, white, and dark.” The event will take place on Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in the Main Hall (60, Volodymyrska str., Red building). Admission is free.   

During the lecture Jeff Wall will present his work and the technologies that he uses, accompanying his discourse by numerous visual materials. The audience will have an opportunity to learn about the background of Wall’s art projects, as well as his oeuvre and creative strategy as a whole. A Q&A session will follow the lecture.

Jeff Wall is a prominent Canadian photographer who has a continuing fascination with the
tableau – the picture that hangs independently on a wall and shows the viewer something unique and significant – and brought its qualities into photography. Some of his work made direct reference to important paintings in order to emphasize the relation between the arts.

He is best known for his photographic transparencies backlit in light boxes with subjects ranging from “near-documentary” glimpses of urban and suburban everyday life to elaborately artificial constructed images.

Since 1990s Wall has worked with the new digital imaging technologies. They have expanded his practice and permitted him to work in forms of photomontage that were almost impossible before the computer entered the field of photography. His montages are invisible so that his pictures always seem to be single and unified.

The lecture of Jeff Wall is supported by Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

The show “In light, black, colour, white, and dark” by Jeff Wall at the PinchukArtCentre includes 17 photographs and 7 light boxes. It is located on the 2^nd and 3^rd floors and will last from 4 February to 1 April 2012.  

Due to the limited number of seats, please register in advance by calling +38 044 590-08-58 or e-mailing [email protected]

For attention of the Mass Media:

For any details regarding the accreditation for photo and video shooting of the event, please contact Press Office by e-mailing to: [email protected]

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada

Wall has practiced and studied art since childhood. From 1964 to 1970, he studied art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. For his M.A. in art history (1970), he wrote a thesis on aspects of Dada movement. From 1970 to 1973, Wall did postgraduate studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He worked on John Heartfiled and Marcel Duchamp, and read widely in the history of art, cinema and photography.

He had many international solo shows including at ICA, London (1984), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (1993), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2001), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2001), Hasselblad Center, Goteborg (2002), Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2004) and retrospectives at Schaulager, Basel (2005), Tate Modern, London (2005), Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2007) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007).

In 2002, Wall was awarded the Hasselblad Award.