Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg / Truth Study Center / Wolfgang Tillmans

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The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, coproduced for the exhibition Rebuilding the Future, which took place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2018–2019. Conceived and designed by Tillmans and featuring conversations with the artist as well as several additional texts, the book explores the developments in his work over the last three years. Moran, Justin. “Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans Opens Up About Living HIV Positive.” OUT, Out Magazine, 18 Apr. 2017, www.out.com/positive-voices/2017/4/10/photographer-wolfgang-tillmans-opens-about-living-hiv-positive The Museum of Modern Art will present Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the artist’s first museum survey in New York, from September 12, 2022 through December 31, 2022. Unique groupings of approximately 350 of Tillmans’s photographs, videos, and multimedia installations will be displayed according to a loose chronology throughout MoMA’s sixth floor. Organized by Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan and Phil Taylor, the exhibition will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art following its run at MoMA.

I wanted to somehow represent what was not being represented elsewhere. Even though my early photographs are re-enactments, they are showing people at rest and at ease with themselves. They are not doing silly poses or wrapped up in fashion. In that way, they are images of a kind of freedom that was not being expressed honestly elsewhere.”But beneath that, it’s also a perfect representation of the many entangled themes that awaits listeners.

Wake (2001). Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans. Image courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London Always in the good hands of Eugen Ivan Bergmann at the Between Bridges space in Berlin, we held events around Brexit and related subjects, the refugee crisis and the rise of populism and right wing extremism across Europe. of what art could be. He exhibited faxes, postcards and printed-up darkroom mistakes, and worked across different artistic Tillmans began experimenting with abstraction while in high school, using the powerful enlargement function of an early digital photocopier to copy and degrade his own photographs as well as those cut from newspapers. He describes the coexistence of chance and control involved in this process as an essential ingredient in most of his work.

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Fragile, a major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, organized by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany, and traveled throughout Africa, with its last stop at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria. Qu’est-ce qui est différent? was presented at Carré d'Art - Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France, in 2018. Rebuilding the Future was on view at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2018–2019. The exhibition Today Is The First Day was presented at WIELS, Brussels, in 2020. Sound is Liquid was on view at the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, in 2022. The English National Opera’s production of War Requiem featured sets and visual design by Wolfgang Tillmans. There were five evening performances from November 22 through December 7, 2018 at theEnglish National Opera inSt Martin’s Lane, London.

In the mid-late 80s, he bought a cheap camera, and embarked on his photography journey. He established a name for himself with his photos covering the gay club scene and red-light district in Hamburg (most of which were published primarily by i-D, if you really look hard enough you can find them floating around). If I’d have seen this on the landscape when Iwas 15, it would have changed everything for me. It’d have been abeacon in the dark. How much less lonely Iwould have felt. The self-print and social media parts of the campaign were the most visible, but I’m glad I insisted on having old fashioned A1 posters. Thanks to the financial help of Evelyn Stern, David Chipperfield and Ruth and Richard Rogers we printed 25000 of them. Daniel Mason of Something Else Press handled the logistics of this printing job in London. A Book for Architects was also featured in a solo exhibition of the artist's work at the Dům Umění– Galerie Současného Umění České Budějovice in the Czech Republic. What does that even mean,” you’re undoubtedly wondering? Well, a simplified version would be this: Wolfgang Tillmans is an openly gay man and has been since his Hamburg years. I promise I only mention that because that experience has given Tillmans and his work a different perspective on the world around him.The artist’s first traveling solo exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans: View from above, presented his work at four museums across Europe. Following its debut at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the show traveled to Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and finally the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring previously unpublished works and contributions by Zdenek Felix, Ida Gianelli, Jerôme Sans, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Poul Erik Tojner; the publication includes a conversation between Tillmans and Nathan Kernan, and an essay by Giorgio Verzotti. This is the third and final leg of Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the most comprehensive exhibition of the influential artist’s work to date. This landmark exhibition charts the development of his practice from the 1980s through the present, across every genre of photography imaginable. From early experiments with a photocopier to ecstatic nightlife images, intimate portraits, incisive documentation of social movements, and innovative cameraless abstractions, Tillmans’s broad subject matter reveals his steadfast commitment to engage unflinchingly with the world. In 2000, Wolfgang Tillmans became the first photographer to win the annual Turner Prize organized by Tate in London. The award was based on Tillmans’s solo exhibitions held in 1999, including those at Interim Art in London (now Maureen Paley gallery), Städtische Galerie in the artist’s hometown of Remscheid in Germany, and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, as well as his published work in books and magazines. The jury—which, among others, included Julia Peyton-Jones, then director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, Matthew Slotover, publisher of frieze magazine, and then Tate Director Nicholas Serota—praised Tillmans for his engagement with contemporary culture, his challenge to conventional aesthetics, and for taking photography in new directions though the methods and presentation of his work. Portraiture has been central to Tillmans’s practice for three decades. For him, it is a collaborative act that he has described as ‘a good levelling instrument’. No matter who the sitter – a stranger or someone close to him, a public figure, an unknown individual, or even the artist himself – the process is characterised by the same dynamics: of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self-consciousness. Tillmans sees every portrait as resulting from the expectations and hopes of both sitter and photographer. This enigma also stems from the raw vulnerability of Tillmans’ voice. Whether lyrically playful or introspective, it is always giving: intimately unfolding as in the surprising take on Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘El Condor Pasa’ or shapeshifting in ‘Can’t Escape into Space’ or fully naked as raw material expression in ‘Kantine’ and ‘Ocean Walk’.