BASEL, SWITZERLAND.-Schaulager presents Jeff Wall. Photographs 1978 – 2004, on view through September 25, 2005. The Schaulager exhibition features some seventy pictures and thus offers the first opportunity to appreciate the full range and diversity of the Canadian artist's work over the last 25 years.

Jeff Wall (born 1946) has been making photographs since 1967. He first created his large-format colour transparencies in 1978; for the past ten years, he has also been making black and white photographs on paper. A feature of Jeff Wall's photographs is that they are neither part of series nor are they composed as groups of works. Each picture is an individual composition in its own right. Some of these pictures have become icons of contemporary photography, yet many others are little known.

The exhibition shows how, apart from the technical and thematic innovations, a new pictorial concept has gradually taken shape in this œuvre. Echoing Baudelaire, Jeff Wall long ago referred to this pictorial concept as the "painting of modern life", but evolving a hundred years later under quite different conditions and using the language of photography.