Ian Wallace
Friday, 17 April 2026
Work from Ian Wallace at Hauser & Wirth, London.
“A poet of images, Ian Wallace explores the interplay between form and content, using photography as a vehicle for developing an avant-garde art that weds the strategies of conceptualism with the pictorial tropes of painting. In doing so since the late ’60s, he became the pioneer of a photoconceptualism that fundamentally influenced and reconfigured contemporary art practice in Vancouver, not least through his teaching such artists as Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Stan Douglas. Wallace’s art encourages a sophisticated involvement from the viewer. His works awaken the allegorical, symbolic potential of everyday subject matter, investing ostensibly non-eventful scenes with meaning. For his first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth – which coincides with a presentation of his work in three concurrent chapters at the Kunstverein fur die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Kunsthalle Zurich – Wallace is showing four new, interrelated works. ‘The photographic aspect is bringing meaning and representation of the everyday into focus; the monochrome is almost like the antipode of photographic meaning – its about historical positioning,’ Wallace has explained. This joining together of figuration and abstraction creates a delicate conjunction of incompatibles whose reconciliations might take place in the viewer’s mind. In this way the artist’s pensive, reverberating art calls attention beyond its apparent subject matter to the act of looking itself.” – Hauser & Wirth