Jeff Wall (1946 -) - The Thinker / Le penseur, 1986

Fine art colour offset photolithograph.
Printed on high quality “Satimatt” paper (250g/qm) by Arjomari, Paris.
Published in limited edition by Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 1989.
Typographically credited lower center and upper right (verso blank).
Part of a limited series (small edition - extremely rare).
In very good condition.
Registered shipping.

Info:
Jeff Wall is one of the most important photographers to emerge in the last forty years and arguably one of the most successful artists living and working in Canada.

The Thinker was photographed in Vancouver in summer 1996. The work is inspired by Albrecht Dürer's Bauernsäule (Peasant's Column), a woodcut print in Dürer's famous teatrise 'Underwiesung der Messung' of 1525. Dürer's column is a proposal for a monument commemorating the defeat of the peasant uprising in Germany in the 16th century. A disillusioned and weeping peasant , who appears to have been stabbed in the back with a sword, is seated on top as if in contemplation of his betrayal and the failure of the peasant cause.
The Thinker is Wall's proposal for an 'imaginary monument, dedicated to disappointment and failure'. Wall's Thinker is not a peasant but an elderly worker seated on a reduced version of the column consisting of a tree trunk, a curbstone and a cement building block. The pose of the Thinker also recalls the sculpture Le Penseur of 1880 by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).