From Oct. 9, 2025 to Feb. 1, 2026, the Gallerie d’Italia - Turin, a museum of Intesa Sanpaolo, will host JEFF WALL. PHOTOGRAPHS, a retrospective dedicated to one of the absolute protagonists of contemporary photography. The exhibition, curated by David Campany, a writer, art critic and creative director of the International Center of Photography in New York, brings together twenty-seven works spanning more than forty years of the Canadian photographer’s career, from 1980 to the most recent works made in 2023. Jeff Wall, born in Vancouver in 1946, has redefined the boundaries of art photography, moving between staged and documentary observation. His images, often large format, present seemingly everyday situations, but charged with narrative tension and ambiguity.
The artist addresses central themes of contemporary society--nature, war, issues of gender, race, and class--by posing questions about how collective events and social structures shape individual experience. His compositions, often enigmatic at first glance, become true devices for reflection. In the exhibition, the Turin itinerary offers a comprehensive overview of his work, placing his best-known images in dialogue with lesser-known works that are nevertheless fundamental to understanding the evolution of his visual language. The selection includes some of Wall’s lightboxes, large backlit transparencies inspired by advertising, alongside color and black-and-white prints. Presented life-size, the photographs engage the viewer in an immersive experience: the monumental scale and artificial luminosity generate an effect of suspension, as if reality were crystallized in a theatrical instant.
Wall has repeatedly stated that he does not consider himself a reportage photographer. “I am not an image hunter,” he said recently. His works are not born from the immediacy of the shot, but from a long process of construction that involves planning, choosing locations, and setting up lighting and extras. In fact, the artist works with dilated times, composing real sets, often making use of digital techniques to achieve a balance of elements that harks back to the grammar of cinema. The result is photography that is “almost” documentary, as he calls it: scenes that seem to be captured from reality, but are actually derived from a refined conceptual construction. Numerous works in the exhibition reveal Wall’s deep relationship with the history of art, literature and film. The Thinker takes a photographic take on Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, while After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue is inspired by the American writer’s novel to address the theme of social invisibility. In Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, July 18, 1994 the reference is to Franz Kafka, and the image becomes a metaphor for the absurd and modern alienation. Intertextuality is an integral part of his language: Wall cites, transforms and recontextualizes works by Hokusai, Manet, Delacroix, interweaving references that broaden the field of interpretation of his photographs.
Opening the Turin itinerary is I giardini(The Gardens, 2017), made right near the Piedmontese capital, at Villa Silvio Pellico. The triptych shows figures moving through a labyrinth of hedges, replicating themselves as doubles in a sequence of appearances. The image recalls the theme of expulsion from paradise, an iconographic topos reinterpreted with a temporal and narrative ambiguity that reflects Wall’s interest in the thresholds between reality and imagination. The works on display testify to the consistency and depth of a research that has helped redefine photography as a conceptual and narrative medium. The artist constructs meanings; he interrogates their representation. Jeff Wall is today recognized as one of the most influential artists on the international scene. His works are part of the permanent collections of museums such as the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The Turin exhibition thus fits into the groove of the major retrospectives that have been dedicated to him around the world, offering an opportunity to delve into the complexity of a research still in full development.
The exhibition project is accompanied by the traditional #INSIDE public program, which includes a series of free-access talks every Wednesday evening. The opening will be preceded by a double appointment on Thursday, October 9: at 6 p.m. Jeff Wall will dialogue with David Campany, offering an opportunity for direct discussion on his own work and the role of contemporary photography; afterwards, from 7 p.m., the artist will be available for a signacopy of the catalog published by Società Editrice Allemandi. The Gallerie d’Italia - Turin is part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum project, which also includes branches in Milan, Naples and Vicenza, under the direction of Michele Coppola, Executive Director Art, Culture and Historical Assets of the Bank.
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| Jeff Wall at Gallerie d'Italia in Turin: photography as scene and reflection |
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