MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology) presents Jeff Wall: Time stands still, a landmark exhibition by one of the most influential visual artists of the past four decades. Marking Wall’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works spanning from 1980 to 2023.

Time stands still showcases key themes that have shaped Wall’s distinctive practice: images from everyday life, struggles inherent to modern and contemporary societies, such as loneliness, poverty, alienation, urban violence and ostracisation.

The works on display at MAAT Gallery depict observed and imagined scenarios and compositions that draw on Wall’s interest in art historical paintings, performance and cinema.

Time stands still mainly features large-scale photographs, some of which are backlit, a method Wall adopted in 1978, following his first visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid. Enchanted by the dramatic realism of paintings by great masters, such as Velázquez, Goya and Titian, Wall looked for a way to represent everyday life in his photographs. A chance encounter with an illuminated advert sparked a breakthrough in Wall’s practice and what would become his trademark: art historical and cinematic compositions created using photography.

Wall's images are meticulously choreographed and composed, a process that he calls ‘cinematography’. Wall explains: "the poetics or “productivity” of my work has centred on staging and pictorial composition, what I call “cinematography”. It is this, I hope, that makes it evident that the theme has been subjectivised, that it has been portrayed, reconfigured according to my feelings and literacy."