Jeff Wall | Fortified Door

Jeff Wall
Fortified Door
London, UK: Phaidon, 2008
280 pp., 20.75" x 16.75", boxed hardcover
Edition of 100 [+ 10 AP]


A signed and numbered silver gelatin print with a custom-bound special edition of the hardcover book featuring 185 colour and 30 black and white illustrations, housed in a cloth-covered custom clamshell box.


"The documentary image Fortified Door is a portrait of urban defense that denies entry not only to visitors but also to the viewer. Tightly cropped and shot nearly head-on, it offers little information about its location or context—although small clues can be found at the edges of the photo. The door and the picture of it share a particularly ambivalent position in time, quoting idioms from the past but bearing traces of the present.

The Survey by Thierry de Duve, author of Pictorial Nominalism and The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, proposes an alternative history of modernism. Critic and curator Arielle Pelenc talks with the artist on themes ranging from storytelling to cinematography. Boris Groys, author of Contemporary Art from Moscow, focuses on the meaning of light in Jeff Wall's work. The Update section by French art critic and historian of photograpy Jean-Francois Chevrier surveys Wall's work from 1995 to the present. The artist has chosen texts by Blasie Pascal and Franz Kafka for the Artist's Choice, and the Artist's Writings celebrate Wall as an art historian and theorist by including key essays and important interviews."

— Phaidon

A self-titled exhibition of Wall's work opens two weeks today (April 30) at Gagosian Gallery in NYC, with a reception from 6 to 8pm. The exhibition continues until June 22nd.