Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg / Truth Study Center / Wolfgang Tillmans

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Jobey, Liz. Wolfgang Tillmans: the Lightness of Being. 25 June 2010, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/jun/26/wolfgang-tillmans-serpentine-photographs-exhibition 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. TIME named Wolfgang Tillmans to the 2023 TIME100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The full list and related tributes appear in the April 24 issue of TIME, available on newsstands on Friday, April 14, and now at TIME.com. The list, now in its twentieth year, recognizes the impact, innovation and achievement of the world’s most influential individuals.

One of the images, Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees, became a defining, if utopian vision of the free-spirited and open-minded generation the artist sought to portray. Tillmans’ experiments with still life, landscape and abstract imagery The project first ran at Between Bridges, the non-profit exhibition space Tillmans opened in London in 2006 and has since transferred to Berlin. In three exhibition (‘Colourbox’, ‘American Producers’ ‘Bring Your Own’) that took place between September 2014 and February 2015, he invited visitors to come and listen to music at almost the same quality at which it was originally mastered. The focus on a very few works in this room serves as an example of Tillmans’s varied approaches to exhibiting his prints. Though best known for installations comprising many pictures, he always places emphasis on the strength of the individual image. 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. In an increasingly interconnected world voices that create division between people and peoples, have gathered momentum and try to unravel the achievements of cooperation and solidarity. Europeans in particular are challenged by nationalist and divisive language from outside and from within the EU.The cover of Frank Ocean’s Blond (also stylized as, “ Blonde,”) says a lot about the album, more than most people would realize without listening to it an inordinate amount of times. On the surface it’s a simple picture of Frank Ocean in a bathroom, covering his face, while some mid-winter sunlight creeps over him via a bathroom window. 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. Rebuilding the Future was conceived as an open question for its visitors to interpret. Featuring work that reflects on the subject of time, among other themes, the show continuedTillmans’s inquiry into what it means to create pictures in today’s increasingly image-saturated environment and how to portray a world in flux. "While [photographs] are visually so powerful, convincing, and immediate, there is a lot of symbolic meaning in [their] material fragility,"the artist tells Charles Shafaieh in a profile for The Irish Times on the occasion of the exhibition; "There is a very potent contradiction in the very power and presence of a photograph, its vividness and ultimate instability. These very large unframed works [at IMMA] came from an interest in being strong, fragile and vulnerable at the same time, which certainly goes for humans. We are incredibly resilient, strong, inventive, and, at the same time, incredibly vulnerable." Rebuilding the Future followedthe artist’s critically acclaimed solo show at Tate Modernin 2017. Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is among the most influential contemporary artists, and the impact of his work registers across the arts, intersecting with fashion, music, architecture, the performing arts and activism. Tillmans is the recipient of the Turner Prize (2000) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015). His foundation, Between Bridges, supports the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBTQ rights.

Militant would be a bit extreme to describe Tillmans’ new approach to life and photography, but he definitely was more open/forward about being an advocate for LGBTQ communities, as well as HIV/AIDS awareness. 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. The artist joined David Zwirner in 2014, and PCR marked his inaugural exhibition with the gallery in New York the following year. In 2018, his work was the subject of two solo exhibitions at the gallery’s Hong Kong and New York locations. His most recent solo exhibition with the gallery, Fold Me, was presented in September 2023 at David Zwirner, New York. In 2003, Wolfgang Tillmans’s first midcareer retrospective, if one thing matters, everything matters, was held at Tate Britain in London. Opening three years after Tillmans was awarded the Turner Prize, this critically acclaimed presentation marked the first time the museum had devoted an exhibition to a single photographer. Among a number of works created specifically for the show was a large-scale video installation, Lights (Body) (2000–2002).

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From the outset of his career, Wolfgang Tillmans(b. 1968, Germany) has revolutionized the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, making connections between his pictures in response to a given context and activating the space of the exhibition by hanging photographs in a corner, above a doorframe, on a free-standing column, or next to a fire extinguisher. In developing his own language for these overall installations, Tillmans’s practice verges into a sculptural dimension. The decisive logic of his practice is a visual democracy, best summarized by his phrase “If one thing matters, everything matters.” of what art could be. He exhibited faxes, postcards and printed-up darkroom mistakes, and worked across different artistic In 2017, the Tate Modern, London, held a major survey of Tillmans’s work. The artist also presented a new immersive installation featuring his work in music and video in the South Tank at the museum. Later that year, solo shows of Tillmans’s work were on view at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, marking the institution’s first comprehensive examination of photography as a medium, as well as at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.

The exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art received wide critical acclaim. "Through the cycling shots of exteriors, interiors, skylines, and street views," says Architectual Digest, "Tillmans paints a portrait of modern-day architecture, showing the stylistic synchronicity in our globalized world." Artforum described the exhibition as "an ambitious recalibration of the relationship between architecture and image" and The New Yorker concluded "The range is encyclopedic, the experience exhilarating."But beneath that, it’s also a perfect representation of the many entangled themes that awaits listeners. Benjamin Britten’s choral masterpiece from 1962 pairs the antiwar poetry of World War I soldier Wilfred Owen (who died a week before Armistice) with the Latin Requiem Mass, for an opera that is a "passionate outcry against man’s inhumanity to man." This production includes the full English National Opera orchestra, an eighty-person chorus, a children’s choir, a chamber orchestra, and three soloists. As set designer, Tillmans was responsible for "every item and visual you see on stage." is not a retrospective. Each room in the exhibition has been specially configured by Tillmans as a personal response to the present moment. Ever conscious of his role as an artist, his works engage us with themes of community and sociability, empathy and vulnerability. But at the end of the day, for me, it’s also an incredibly ordinary thing,” he concludes. ​ “Here are two lads sharing akiss. What could be more normal than that?”

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. Wake (2001). Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans. Image courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London The photograph] speaks to me of love and embrace,” continues the New York-based Scotsman. ​ “First of all, there’s sexual desire there because of the kiss. But the way that one lad is cradling the other lad’s head is incredibly tender. There’s amoment of care there. It reminds me alot of Renaissance paintings, or religious iconography where someone is being held.” Informed by new scholarship and eight years of dialogue with the artist, the exhibition will highlight how Tillmans’s profoundly inventive, philosophical, and creative approach is both informed by and designed to highlight the social and political causes for which he has been an advocate throughout his career.So, what was he trying to do? After consuming an unhealthy number of interviews, the best way to describe is true intention was to just show real life. In still life, Calle Real II 2013, a severed agave chunk is placed on a German newspaper article describing the online depiction of atrocities by Islamic State. The image is as startling in its depiction of the finest green hues as it is in capturing how, simultaneously, we taken in world events alongside details of our personal environment.