JEFF WALL | Children

Edition de 3 exemplaires + 1 épreuve d'artiste

Private Collection, Belgium (acquired circa 1995)

Marseille, Galerie Roger Pailhas; Lyon, La Villa Gillet, F.R.A.C. Rhône-Alpes; and Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, Dan Graham, Jeff Wall: Children's Pavilion, 1989 (ed. no. unknown)

Thierry de Duve, et al., Jeff Wall, London 2006, p. 109, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition and full working order. Close inspection reveals a few scuffs in places to the colour transparency and a few minute losses to the white border. Further close inspection reveals a few small nicks to the edges of the metallic frame.
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Executed in 1988, Children, belongs to a series of nine photographs included in Jeff Wall’s Children’s Pavilion; a critically acclaimed collaboration with artist Dan Graham, presented in 1989. Making reference to civic and municipal spaces in which communities gather, learn, worship and reflect, Children’s Pavilion resignified architypal architectures such as the grotto, the mausoleum, and the observatory to comment on the dynamic relationship between children’s play and adult watchfulness. Whilst other buildings memorialise fathers, heroes and elders; the Children’s Pavilion endeavours to empower children in a position normally held by their forebears. Although the thought provoking project was never realised, plans, maquettes, drawings, essays and Wall’s original photographs, including the present work, effectively communicate the artists’ intentions. Envisioned as a building located on the periphery of a playground, the Pavilion is a setting for contemplation and refuge. Adorned on its interior walls, nine back-illuminated roundels hang depicting children of different racial origins, all of whom are monumentalised against an illusionistic and romanticised cloud formation. Describing the series, Wall commented, “the tondo form is associated with ceremonial or decorative portraits and figure-groups often featuring women, children and angels; but it is also related to coins, on which the heads of rulers are minted. The circular form also relates to the sphere and therefore to the symbol of the cosmos, but also to a rubber ball flying through the air above a playground. Balls, bubbles, lollipops and other round, shiny, happy forms are parts of the world of toys which are vehicles in adventure fantasies” (Jeff Wall cited: in Dan Graham and Jeff Wall, ‘The Children’s Pavilion’, Parkett, No. 22, 1989, p. 68).

With intensified and saturated hues, the present work depicts a half-length portrait of a child, arm elevated as though addressing an audience. There is certainly an air of influence and leadership emanating from the young girl, as though this is a figure of power and governance. Parallels may also be drawn between Wall’s aesthetic and that of advertising and pop culture; vibrant, glossy and visually striking the present work is a campaign of sorts perhaps political, perhaps consumer driven. Here, the dramatisation of Wall’s subjects is rooted in the meticulous construction of appearances; a method akin to both cinematography and the tradition of Renaissance oil painting. In this, Wall attempts to recover the qualities of an older pictorial idiom which he considers to be integral to modern culture and inherent to our society. Since the 1980s Wall has continued to confront Contemporary art with the sensuality and the pictorialism of mass culture while simultaneously instilling mass culture with the intellectual, political and aesthetic traditions of the avant-garde.