Jeff Wall in Basel

Below, I share an excerpt from the exhibition catalog in which Wall discusses one of his recent works that I particularly liked.

“Actor in two roles (2020) was stimulated by my interest in the way actors are able to transform their appearance from role to role. Many of my subjects or starting points are quite simple. This is not because I want the work to be popular but because I would like it to connect with elemental concerns or interests that I believe I must share with people. The subject of the actor’s mutation echoes the resemblance effect that captivated me in making ‘Pair of Interiors’, but here the actor attempts precisely not to resemble herself and instead to appear to be someone else, someone with possibly almost no recognizable similarity to herself.
Actors can find themselves in an almost dizzying variety of productions, each one requiring different types of performance and appearance. One could be in a children’s musical in the afternoon and an intense realist classic play in the evening of the same day. I decide that the setting had to be live theater in order to avoid having to include any distracting tangles of film or video equipment.”¹

During my visit to the Fondation Beyeler, I had the chance to wander around the park and came across some unexpected works of art, such as Fischli/Weiss’s Snowman (1987), a snow sculpture preserved and kept frozen for decades. I found it brilliant.