LISBON.- MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology) presents Jeff Wall: Time Stands Still. Photographs 1980-2023, a landmark exhibition by one of the most influential visual artists of the past four decades. Marking Wall’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works spanning from 1980 to 2023.

Time Stands Still showcases key themes that has shaped Wall’s distinctive practice: images from everyday life, struggles inherent to modern and contemporary societies, such as loneliness, poverty, alienation, urban violence and ostracisation.

The works on display at MAAT Gallery depict observed and imagined scenarios and compositions that draw on Wall’s interest in art historical paintings, performance and cinema.

Time Stands Still mainly features large-scale photographs, some of which are backlit, a method Wall adopted in 1978, following his first visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid. Enchanted by the dramatic realism of paintings by great masters, such as Velázquez, Goya and Titian, Wall looked for a way to represent everyday life in his photographs. A chance encounter with an illuminated advert, sparked a breakthrough in Wall’s practice and what would become his trademark: art historical and cinematic compositions created using photography.

Wall's images are meticulously choreographed and composed, a process that he calls ‘cinematography’. Wall explains: "the poetics or “productivity” of my work has centred on staging and pictorial composition, what I call “cinematography”. It is this, I hope, that makes it evident that the theme has been subjectivised, that it has been portrayed, reconfigured according to my feelings and literacy."

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives and works. He became involved with photography in the 1960s, and by the mid-1970s, he was experimenting with his new version of pictorial photography. From 1977, his pictures were made as backlit colour transparencies, presented in lightboxes, many of them on a large scale, a medium identified at the time with advertising rather than photographic art. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has expanded his repertoire, working with traditional black-and-white prints and, more recently, inkjet colour prints.

Jeff Wall’s photographs often depict events the artist has witnessed and reconstructed in a process he calls “cinematography”. His subject matter ranges from everyday occurrences photographed in real places to imaginary situations constructed in a studio. He is considered one of the artists who, since the 1970s, has led the way in emphasising the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. He taught art at universities in Canada for twenty-five years, and his critical writing has been collected and published in several languages.

Jeff Wall’s pictures have been exhibited worldwide over the past forty years. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions in various institutions. These include the Tate Modern, London (touring to the Schaulager, Basel, 2005); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (touring to The Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007); and most recently, the Glenstone Museum, Potomac (2021) and the Beyeler Foundation, Basel (2024). Group exhibitions include documenta X, Kassel (1997); 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998); Documenta11, Kassel (2002); 12th Biennale of Sydney (2000); and the 5th Shanghai Biennale (2004).