Jeff Wall: Mother of pearl Poster

This poster reproduces Jeff Wall's photograph Mother of pearl (2016) and was produced in 2019 for Jeff Wall, his first exhibition with Gagosian, at the gallery's West 21st Street location in New York.

The photograph shows a child in a room furnished with antique furniture and keepsakes, absorbed in a set of iridescent mother-of-pearl game counters spread across an open box. Wall builds the image from an ordinary domestic setting, using it to stage a child's private absorption within a heavily decorated adult interior.

Wall (b. 1946, Vancouver) has worked since the late 1970s in large-scale color photography, moving between elaborately staged tableaux and scenes closer to documentary observation. Mother of pearl belongs to the constructed side of that practice, and this 2019 exhibition marked the start of his representation by Gagosian.