Jeff Wall's Comprehensive Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler

Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, near Basel, presents a major Jeff Wall exhibition across eleven rooms, featuring 55 works including large-format black-and-white photographs, color inkjet prints, and his iconic lightboxes. The show, running until April 21, 2024, spans five decades of the Canadian artist's career, highlighting his signature approach of blending reality and fiction to subvert narrative photography. Wall, who earned a PhD in art history in London, began as a documentary photographer in Vancouver's peripheries before shifting to constructed tableaux in the early 1980s. Key works include 'Parent child' (2018), 'In front of a night club' (2006), 'After ‹Invisible Man› by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue' (1999/2000), and 'A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)' (1993), the latter a large lightbox referencing Hokusai's woodcut and assembled from about a hundred digital collages over five months. The exhibition also coincides with the completion of a new building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor on the museum grounds, expanding the Beyeler's art-nature connection. The catalog is edited directly by Wall.