archivetillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (Roma) 2007, C-type print, 30.5 x 40.6 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer, right 2004, Inkjet print, 231.1 × 607.8 cm, Collection of Kunstmuseum Basel, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Redefining Photography, One Convention at a Time

Wolfgang Tillmans, Gedser 2004, C-type print, 40.6 × 30.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Urgency XXII 2006, Framed C-type print, 238 × 181 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Venus, transit 2004, C-type print, 40.6 × 30.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Kuh 2008, Framed photocopy, 29.7 × 21 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Nanbei Hu 2009, Inkjet print, 207 x 138 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Heptathlon 2009, Inkjet print, 208.5 x 138 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
020 7402 6075
London
Wolfgang Tillmans
June 26-September 19, 2010

Over the past 20 years, Wolfgang Tillmans has redefined photography and how it is shown. Known by the early 1990s for seemingly casual images of the world he inhabited, his work reassessed photographic conventions and reflected identity politics of the time, capturing the fragility of human life and focusing on everyday objects. This early work then expanded to engage portraiture, landscape, still-life and, recently, abstraction. Tillmans’ abstract work, celebrated in the last decade, continues to push boundaries and definitions of the photographic form, and is a particular focus of this exhibition.

Serpentine Gallery presents Tillmans’ first major exhibition in London since 2003. Conceived by the artist for the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition presents both abstract and figurative work.

The wide-ranging themes in Tillmans’ photographs are combined in his reconfiguration of accumulated images, created in response to a given space. In this exhibition, explorations into abstraction sit alongside a new focus on the figurative — increasingly informed by recent colour field works and experiments with process. Referring to his approach to installation making Tillmans said: "In the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences... Multiple singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room."

The Serpentine Gallery exhibition reflects the artist’s acute sensitivity to the politics of contemporary society, his ongoing fascination with colour, and his conceptual engagement with the technical processes of photography. These delicate yet challenging images capture the distinctive energetic balance between beauty and subversion that Tillmans has long embraced.

Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. He studied in Great Britain at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design, graduating in 1992. In the 1990s, his work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kunsthalle Zurich; and Portikus, Frankfurt, amongst others. In 2000 he won the Tate's Turner Prize. A large survey exhibition in 2001-2003 toured to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark. His show called •Freedom from the Known• at P.S.1, New York (2006) was followed by a major tour of North American museums. In 2008, Tillmans had an extensive solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin entitled Lighter, and in 2009 was included in Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale. More than 20 monographic books on his work have been published to date and an exhibition catalogue accompanies the Serpentine Gallery exhibition.

The exhibition runs concurrently with the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010, designed by Jean Nouvel and opening on 10 July. Housed in the Pavilion is artist Christian Boltanski’s Les Archives du Coeur installation.

Wolfgang Tillmans, haircut 2007, C-type print, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Zimmerlinde (Michel) 2006, Framed C-type print, 211 × 145 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Dan 2008, C-type print, 61 × 50.8 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, in flight astro (ii) 2010, Inkjet print, 207.5 x 138 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Anders pulling splinter from his foot 2004, C-type print, 61 × 50.8 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Roy 2009, C-type print, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Muqarnas 2006, Framed C-type print, 214 × 145 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Silver Installation VII 2009, Unique C-type prints, 306 × 843 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, morning 2009, C-type print, 30.5 × 40.6 cm, Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Paper drop (Berlin), 2007, © Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln.

Surveying Wolfgang Tillmans in the Christian Flick Collection

Wolfgang Tillmans, photocopy, 1994, © Wolfgang Tillmans, Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Garden, 2007, © Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln.

Hamburger Bahnhof
Invalidenstraße 50/51
+49-0-30-3978-3412
Berlin
Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter
March 21-August 24, 2008

This exhibition features new works from Nationalgalerie, the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof, and loans.

With this large-scale solo Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition, the Nationalgalerie offers the first comprehensive overview of the complex oeuvre of Wolfgang Tillmans in Berlin to date. On view are legendary portraits, still lifes, urban views, and landscapes with which Tillmans made a singular contribution to shaping sensibilities of the 1990s and challenging the photographic medium to renew and transform itself.

An additional and central focus of this exhibition will be the abstract works, which continue to expand Tillmans’ visual cosmos, and which have attained particular relevance today: the space-filling, atmospheric images of the Freischwimmer (Swimming to Freedom) series, along with the Lighter and Paper Drop studies, almost sculptural in character, and devoted entirely to the magical qualities of paper; until now, these works have never been seen in Germany as an ensemble. The exhibition encompasses more than 200 works from the period 1986 to 2008, among them pivotal pieces such as the early photocopy works (1988-1990), the Turner Prize Room (2000) and the elaborate table installation Truth Study Center (2005-2007).

Accompanying the exhibition in Hamburger Bahnhof will be a wideranging catalog publication devoted to Wolfgang Tillmans’ latest works (Hatje Cantz Verlag), and containing texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Julie Ault and Joachim Jäger.

Tillmans (born August 15, 1968) was born in Remscheid in Germany and lived and worked in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s before moving to England. He studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art from 1990 to 1992. Since 1996 he has lived and worked in London.

Tillmans has published work in magazines such as i-D and Vogue, but he is mostly known for his use of every photographic genre (and the mixing of those genres) and his unique gallery presentation.

Since the mid-1980s, Tillmans has reinterpreted representational genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through photography. He invented a presentational practice that engages the dynamics of space, varying photograph sizes based on spatial setting in a venue and producing them as large inkjet prints and large framed C-prints. First recognized in the early 1990s for photographs of friends and others in his immediate milieu, he developed a highly distinctive style of image making that freely embraces a broad range of subjects — from profound experiences of the everyday to abstractions that result from experiments with the photographic process.

His ability to create intimate and immediate images combined with his innovative exhibition strategies has changed the way in which photographic images are made, read and received. An aspect of his artistic practice is to assume a curatorial role — he creates configurations with his photographs that draw formal, symbolic and ephemeral connections. His installations encourage active audience engagement and ask viewers to consider their own experiences within Tillmans’s visual world.

One of Tillmans's other chief modes of presentation is through the book form, and his numerous collections offer both extended studies of specific artistic interests such as in the book Concorde, while other books function in a way similar to his gallery installations and include images from seemingly several bodies of work,

Wolfgang Tillmans, Deer Hirsch, detail, 1995, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Wolfgang Tillman's Practice of Elaborating on the Quotidian

Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop, 2001, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Suzanne & Lutz, white dress, army skirt, 1993, courtesy of
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street SW
202-633-4674
Washington
Wolfgang Tillmans
May 10-August 12, 2007

Wolfgang Tillmans has garnered international recognition as one of the most significant artists to emerge in the 1990s. Working in photographic genres such as documentary, portraiture, landscape and still life, he creates evocative images that reflect on often overlooked moments and occurrences in everyday life. The survey features approximately 300 photographs, a video and installations of works that span the artist’s career.

Wolfgang Tillmans is co-organized by Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition is curated by Russell Ferguson, adjunct curator at Hammer Museum and chair of the department of art at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Dominic Molon, Pamela Alper associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Tillmans’ work challenges established photographic conventions by combining a sense of immediacy with carefully considered compositions to produce intimate and visually dynamic reflections of contemporary life. He rejects traditional hierarchy in subject matter with distinctive installations created specifically for each presentation. These non-traditional arrangements span entire walls and galleries, incorporating clusters of ink-jet prints and C-print photographs that vary in size. Mixing framed and unframed photographs in the installation, the artist draws out relationships within the body of images as well as associations suggested by the individual pictures.

While certain works are notably singular and iconic, his use of a shifting scale for his prints and an ever-changing rotation of images with each successive installation demonstrates his desire to see all of his pictures as universally significant. The vast range of his images becomes an ongoing “palette,” which he uses repeatedly as a way to continually reinterpret his photographic vision. In doing so, Tillmans suggests that an unassuming image of jars of jam on a countertop is just as significant as an image of a bolt of lightning or a political rally. By applying the same clarity of vision and intensity of purpose to every picture, Tillmans offers a visually unified perspective on the diverse phenomena that comprise the broad spectrum of lived experience.

Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, Tillmans studied at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art in Dorset before moving to London, where he lives and has worked since 1995. Early in his career, Tillmans documented the European club scene in a manner that captured its dynamic style with an affecting sincerity, and he presented this work in carefully crafted spreads for British fashion and lifestyle magazines. He increasingly developed a signature style, intimately presenting subjects ranging from still lifes to portraits of friends and celebrities, subtly alluding to his interest in issues such as homelessness, racism and gay rights. Despite his use of magazine layouts as an early vehicle for his work, his provocative images always challenged the superficial gloss of the fashion industry and subverted notions of beauty and sexuality.

Since the 1990s, Tillmans’ work has turned increasingly toward abstraction. The exhibition at the Hirshhorn includes his new, purely abstract works, which are created through the direct manipulation of light on paper rather than the use of a camera. Among the series he has produced in this manner are “Blushes,” “Mental Pictures” and “Freischwimmer.” Despite their nonrepresentational status, these images—particularly the lush “Freischwimmer” pictures with their sinewy or hair-like lines—still possess a tactility and physicality that give them an almost bodily feel.

Tillmans was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000 by the Tate Modern in London, which recognizes the works of artists younger than 50 who have distinguished themselves nationally in Great Britain. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at numerous international museums, most recently at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2006); the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2004); the Tate Modern in London (2003); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2003); the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002); and the Diechtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany (2001). Tillmans’s work also has been included in major group exhibitions such as “Covering the Real: Art and the Press Picture from Warhol to Tillmans” at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Germany (2005); “Open City: Street Photographs since 1950” at the Hirshhorn Museum (2002) “Moving Pictures” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2002); “Uniform” at the Stazione Leopolda in Florence, Italy (2001); and “The British Art Show 5” at the Hayward Gallery in London (2000).

Works by Tillmans have been acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The exhibition was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from May 20–August 20, 2006 and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, from September 17, 2006–January 7, 2007. Following the presentation in Washington, D.C., the exhibition will travel to the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, from February 14–May 25, 2008 (dates subject to change).

Wolfgang Tillmans, moonrise, Puerto Rico, detail, 1995, courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.