MAAT presents Jeff Wall. Time Stands Still. Photographs, 1980-2023, one of the most extensive exhibitions to date on the work of one of the biggest names on the international visual arts scene in recent decades. It is also the artist's first solo exhibition in Portugal.

The exhibition brings together more than 60 works, which occupy the entire MAAT Gallery and reflect the various themes that the artist has favoured throughout his career: scenes from everyday life, tensions and dramas inherent to modern and contemporary societies, such as loneliness, poverty, alienation, urban violence, abandonment and social exclusion. Situations and scenarios witnessed, imagined or inspired by art history or literary descriptions.

They are images that have been previously thought out, planned and then executed, like the work of a painter or film director. As the artist says, "The poetics or the ‘productivity’ of my work has been in the stagecraft and pictorial composition – what I call ‘cinematography.’ This, I hope, makes it evident that the theme has been subjectivised, has been depicted, reconfigured according to my feelings and literacy.

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives and works. He became involved with photography in the 1960s, and by the mid-1970s, he was experimenting with his new version of pictorial photography. From the fall of 1977, his pictures were made as backlit colour transparencies, presented in lightboxes, many of them on a large scale, a medium identified at the time with publicity rather than photographic art. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has expanded his repertoire, working with traditional black-and-white prints and, more recently, inkjet colour prints.

Jeff Wall’s photographs often depict events the artist has witnessed and reconstructed in a process he calls “cinematography”. His subject matter ranges from everyday occurrences photographed in real places to imaginary situations constructed in a studio. He is considered one of the artists who, since the 1970s, has led the way in emphasising the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. He taught art at universities in Canada for twenty-five years, and his critical writing has been collected and published in several languages.

Jeff Wall’s pictures have been exhibited worldwide over the past forty years. His work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions in various institutions. These include the Tate Modern, London (touring to the Schaulager, Basel, 2005); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (touring to The Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007); and most recently, the Glenstone Museum, Potomac (2021) and the Beyeler Foundation, Basel (2024). Group exhibitions include documenta X, Kassel (1997); 24th Bienal de São Paulo (1998); Documenta11, Kassel (2002); 12th Biennale of Sydney (2000); and the 5th Shanghai Biennale (2004).