Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School[1] and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace.

With his English wife, Jeannette, whom he had met as a student in Vancouver, and their two young sons, he moved to London[2] to do postgraduate work from 1970 to 1973 at the Courtauld Institute, where he studied with T.J.

Their compositions often allude to artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet,[9] or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.

[10] Wall's work beginning in the late 1970s experimented with notions of theatricality influenced by television, advertising, and commercial window displays.

The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.

According to Tate Modern, this success allows Wall to reference "both popular culture (the illuminated signs of cinema and advertising hoardings) and the sense of scale he admires in classical painting.

Susan Sontag ended her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), with a long, laudatory discussion of one of them, Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (1992), calling Wall's Goya-influenced depiction of a made-up event "exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power."

1832) a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind recreates the depicted 19th-century Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, using actors and took over a year to produce 100 photographs in order "to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.

"[21] Since the early 1990s, Wall has used digital technology to create montages of different individual negatives, blending them into what appears as a single unified photograph.

[22] His signature works are large transparencies mounted on light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London.

In 1995, Wall began making traditional silver gelatine black and white photographs, and these have become an increasingly significant part of his work.

[27] For his retrospective at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels in 2011, Wall chose some 130 works by his favorite artists, from 1900s photographer Eugène Atget to film excerpts (Fassbinder, Bergman, the Dardenne brothers) to pieces by contemporaries Thomas Struth and David Claerbout.