Wall to Wall

The work of Canadian artist Jeff Wall situates itself somewhere between painting and cinema. His pristine images - mounted on lightboxes for extra color saturation - are meticulously constructed snapshots of quietly significant events: small, almost automatic and very human reactions that he calls "Micro-gestures". Though he has worked in landscape and still life, his more recent works, such as 1993’s A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai) are often highly artificial, combining pre-orchestrated scenarios with digital post-production. These images are taken from a new and authoritative survey of his work, published by Phaidon.