On 12 March, when Louisiana Museum of Modern Art opens the exhibition ‘Jeff Wall’, visitors to this museum north of Copenhagen will be able to see some of the Canadian photographer’s carefully composed photos. One of the photos remains behind at Louisiana when the exhibition closes on 21 June: ‘Monologue’.
Based on an application to the New Carlsberg Foundation Louisiana received funding to purchase this big photo from 2013.
‘Monologue’ shows three men engaged in conversation in an outdoor space. We can see who is talking, and although the words hang in the air, of course, we cannot hear anything.
‘This is not a snapshot and perhaps not even a presentation of three different men but rather a sort of transformation – a classic religious figure in art – where three stages of consciousness unfold within a single image. Their positioning below and in front of the lamp post and the overhanging cables makes it hard to escape the religious schema. In a more social perspective, the three men might be said not only to be outside their homes but actually marginalized due to the character of their all-male conversation,’ says Museum Curator Anders Kold.
Jeff Wall has helped bring photography into the domain of world images where the painters once reigned supreme, Anders Kold suggests:
‘In this field, Louisiana has other excellent representations, including works by Andreas Gursky, which we also acquired with funding from the New Carlsberg Foundation, and Thomas Struth. With the Jeff Wall purchase, the museum not only continues this line but anchors it in one of the places where it began; Gursky, Struth and others are thus impossible to imagine without the inspiration from Jeff Wall.’