Wolfgang Tillmans

"Tillmans" redirects here. For the community in Virginia, see Tillmans, Virginia.

Wolfgang Tillmans
Nationality	German
Education	Bournemouth and Poole College of Art
Known for	Art and Photography
Awards	Turner Prize (2000)

Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968 in Remscheid) is a German photographer and artist. His comprehensive and diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer and also the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. In 2009, he was awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography).

Life

Wolfgang Tillmans was born on August 16, 1968 in Remscheid. It was during his childhood that he first discovered his interest in photography when he began collecting photographs and magazine clippings. During his first visit to England as an exchange student in 1983, he discovered the British youth-culture and the local fashion and music magazines of the time. From 1987 through 1990, he lived in Hamburg where he also had his first solo exhibitions at Café Gnosa, Front and Frarik-Foto-Forum. From 1990 through 1992, he studied at Bournemouth and the Poole College of Art and Design in southern England. After his studies he moved to London and then to New York in 1994 for a year, where he met the German painter Jochen Klein. After moving back to England, Tillmans lived with Klein until he died of AIDS-related complications in 1997.

Since 1995, Wolfgang Tillmans has lived and worked in London. During the summer of 1998, Tillmans participated in a month-long residency at the last active Shaker community in the world, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Since 2007, he has divided his time between Berlin and London. Following a guest professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Hamburg from 1998 to 1999 and his Honorary Fellowship at the Arts Institute in Bournemouth in 2001, Tillmans has been a professor for Interdisciplinary Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2003. In 2001, Tillmans was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS-Memorial for the City of Munich, whereupon the memorial was erected after his designs at the Sendlinger Tor. In 2011, Tillmans travelled to Haiti with the charity Christian Aid to document reconstruction work after the country's devastating earthquake one year before.

Work

Beginnings

Wolfgang Tillmans was initially known for his seemingly casual, sometimes snapshotlike portraits of friends and other youth in his immediate surroundings and scene. His photos - from the European Gay Pride in London (1992) or the Love Parade in Berlin (1992) for example - appeared in magazines such as i-D, Spex, Interview, SZ-Magazin and Butt-Magazine, and have established his reputation as a prominent witness of a contemporary social movement. He was made co-editor of Spex in 1997.

Tillmans was considered the “documentarian of his generation, especially that of the London club- and gay-scenes.” The series of his friends Lutz and Alex, also published in i-D in 1992, are considered important photographic documents of the 1990s. From 1992 to 1994 Tillmans lived and worked in London, moving to New York in 1994. During this time, he began to show more frequently, developing an exhibition style that consisted of nonhierarchical arrangements of unframed photographs pinned or taped onto the gallery’s walls. Color photographs are placed next to inkjet prints and next to postcards and magazine clippings of his own images, reaching almost to the ceiling and the floor. He views each exhibition as a site-specific installation, often addressing the exhibition space as a larger composition.

"Pictures, in order to see the world”

Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographic practice has since developed to encompass a wide array of genres. His portraits, still lifes, sky photographs (i.e. the Concorde series), astrophotography, aerial shots and landscapes were all motivated equally by aesthetic and political interests and in formulations of reality and truth claims - particularly in relation to homosexuality and gender identity. Tillmans puts it like this: “I take pictures, in order to see the world.” Tillmans produces his photographs in different sizes and formats in meticulous wall-installations, combining them with photocopies, magazine and newspaper clippings (particularly in the installation known as “Soldiers – The Nineties”). The photographs are sometimes taped directly onto the wall, presented in vitrines, or arranged on extensive table-installations (“truth study center”). Operating on the basis of the fundamental equality of all motifs and supports, through this continual re-arranging, repositioning, questioning and reinforcement, Tillmans avoids ascribing any ‘conclusions’ to his work and thus repeatedly subjects his own photographic vision to a perpetual re-contextualization.

Concorde Grid

The 56 photographs of equal dimensions that make up the Concorde Grid were taken in and around London as part of a commission for Tillmans’ exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 1997. They were shot from a wide range of places including private gardens, parks, railway tracks and the perimeter fence around Heathrow airport, recording the daily passing of the airplane.

Abstractions

Since 2000, Wolfgang Tillmans has become increasingly interested in the chemical foundations of photographic material as well as its haptic and spatial possibilities. These works, created directly in the darkroom without the use of a camera and often largely accidental, (i.e. “Blushes”, "Mental Pictures", and “Freischwimmer”), present photography as a self-referential medium--one that could serve as an experimental ground for the creation of a new type of image structure. These “abstract” works now appear next to the figurative photographs. Tillmans further explores the bounds of photography as a medium in his “paper drop” series. Here, he creates extraordinary sculptural forms in photographic paper, then by photographing them returns them to the accustomed flatness of that same medium. Photography’s step from ‘picture’ to ‘object’ is best demonstrated in the works from the “Lighter” Series (ongoing since 2006), recalling his ongoing series "Impossible Color" (1996–present). These colourful photo-paper works are folded, creased or otherwise manipulated, allowing for a subtle play with the material surface and the resulting illusion of lines and contrast. Contained under Plexiglas lids, they have a rather sculptural quality.

Photocopies

His first exhibition in 1988 was comprised exclusively of images that were created with the latest kind of monochrome laser copier. Over the years, Tillmans has often returned to this medium, which has remained a fixed component in his work. The ways that surface structure and image depth influence each other is shown in Wolfgang Tillmans’ large-format works whose original material is analogue photocopies (ongoing since 2006). Here he also references his earlier works from the end of the 1980s that started by experimenting with an old Canon photocopier. The uncontrolled contrasts and pigment particles in the images from these old machines are clear only after drastic enlargement (framed ca. 260 x 180 cm). The resulting effects are distanced but also concrete – created through not only the materiality of the printing process but also the play and variation of scale. With the analogue photocopy – probably the most ephemeral form of image (re)production – a system of values for images is brought into a critical light.

Table works ("truth study center")

In 2005, at his major supporter Maureen Paley's gallery, Tillmans showed his large-scale display-case installation Truth Study Center. Going even further than in his wall-installations, Tillmans’ table works combine a diverse array of image formats and content. His own photographs are presented and arranged under glass next to extracts from books, newspapers, magazines, postcards, packaging and other found materials. The collage-like arrangements of the table displays produce an open-ness and potentiality in terms of aesthetics and content while asking the critical question about the interpretive possibilities of the visible in a global information-society. With that, claims of absolute (in particular religious) truth are caricatured as if Tillmans would like to put them to a kind of test (“truth study center”). The works draw attention to the exercise of power behind the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism, Catholicism, and capitalism.

Videos

In 2002, Tillmans filmed a video clip for the pop band Pet Shop Boys’ single "Home & Dry", composed almost entirely of shots documenting the mice living in the London Underground system. The film Kopierer (2010) depicts an open color laser copy machine, the CLC 1100, in the act of copying documents over a period of ten minutes.

Between Bridges

In April 2006, Tillmans opened the non-profit exhibition space Between Bridges in the ground floor of his London studio with works from the New York artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. In this small gallery located in the same building as his London studio he has developed a program of exhibitions with political art from other artists who he believes have not been given the proper attention they deserve, specifically in London. Previous exhibitions include Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, and the photographs from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Recognition

In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer and also the first non-English artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. In 2009 he was awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography).

Exhibitions

Despite having already exhibited in Hamburg, in 1993 Tillmans held his first exhibition at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne. His work has since been shown in large solo exhibitions at renowned European museums, for example the Kunsthalle Zürich (1995), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1998), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2002), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002), and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2008). Tate Britain’s extensive mid-career retrospective of Tillmans’ work, shown in 2003, was the first time the museum had devoted an exhibition to the work of a single photographer.

In 2006, MoMA PS1 presented Tillmans' first exhibition for an American museum. That same year, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles mounted Tillman's first major retrospective in the US, which travelled to is the first the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, entrusted Tillmans with the role of a guest curator in 2008, inviting him to present a personal choice of works by Isa Genzken, Roberto Matta, and Ellsworth Kelly from the museum's collection. In the summer of 2010 he had a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2005 and in 2009 he was included in the Venice Biennale.

Wolfgang Tillmans’s works are represented internationally in the collections of private collectors and public museums. He is represented by Maureen Paley in London, Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, Juana de Aizpuru in Madrid, Daniel Buchholz in Berlin (since 1993), and Andrea Rosen in New York (since 1994).

Selected solo exhibitions

1995 Kunsthalle Zurich (exh. cat.) Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (exh. cat.)

1997 I Didn’t Inhale, Chisenhale Gallery, London

2001 Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (exh. cat.) View from Above/Aufsicht, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany; Castello di Rivoli—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Italy; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Louisiana Museum for moderne

2002 Vue d’en Haut, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (exh. cat.)

2003 Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands if one thing matters, everything matters, Tate Britain, London (exh. cat.) View From Above, Louisiana Museum for moderne kunst, Humlebœk, Denmark (exh. cat.)

2004 Museum for Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

2006 Freedom From The Known, PS1, New York (exh. cat.) Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, (2007) (exh. cat.) Pinakothek der Moderne (permanent collection), Munich

2007 Beugung, Kunstverein Munich, Munich

2008 Lighter, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin (exh. cat.) Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico

2010 Serpentine Gallery, London (exh. cat.)