The Dardanelles with Fortified Towers and Maritime Activity, ca. 1680

Title: View of the Dardanelles with Fortifications and Ships, ca. 1680 Description: This copperplate engraving offers a detailed view of the Dardanelles Strait, emphasizing its s...

This rare and exquisite view depicts the strategic Dardanelles strait, the narrow passage between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara with the distant cityscape of Istanbul. Part of th...

The documentary image fortified door is a portrait of urban defence 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. Jeff Wall adopts the 19th century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as "a painter of modern life" to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted onto light boxes which diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations. Jeff Wall is foremost among the pioneering artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. His constructed images employ the latest sophisticated technology in the creation of compelling tableaux, which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-century history painting. When exhibited in their glowing light boxes they evoke both the seduction of the cinema screen and the physical presence of minimalist sculptures such as Dan Flavin's fluorescent light installations or Donald Judd's metal and Perspex wall reliefs. All of these elements - traditional figurative painting, cinema, minimalism, conceptual art, documentary photography - are consciously evoked and explored in Wall's work. Associated closely since the late 1960s with conceptual artists such as Dan Graham...

An anatomical lithographic print on paper, depicting the anatomical atlas of the hand. Black lacquered fir wood frame with golden ramin wood batting. N. H. Ja...