PHOTO:Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans has earned recognition as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. First rising to prominence in the ‘90s for his photographs of everyday life and contemporary culture, Tillmans has gone on to work in an ever greater variety of media and has taken an increasingly innovative approach to staging exhibitions. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Wolfgang Tillmans’s solo exhibition at the newly opened David Zwirner Gallery in Hong Kong features a broad selection of works that respond to their surroundings and simultaneously embody a self-contained environment. Including many new photographs not publicly shown before. Spread across the two floors of Gallery, the exhibition presents recent developments in Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, beginning with an infrared self-portrait in which light is blocked out to allow for electromagnetic radiation to reveal thermal energy. Various other processing strategies are deployed throughout the works on view, with figurative scenes interspersed with abstract photographs composed on a photocopying machine and Xeroxes containing text fragments. Moving between private, public, and natural spaces, the works in the exhibition continue the artist’s investigation of the surface of the visible world and the limits of what can be seen. A wall-sized aerial view of the Sahara desert has almost infinite detail due to the high resolution capacities of digital imaging, but it remains an enigmatic landscape; an image of women playing cards on an evening street in Hong Kong taken without flash would have been impossible without recent advances in photographic technology; a still life of aquatic plants and animals reveals what is otherwise hidden beneath the ocean surface; and images of border crossings depict territorial differences that are materially invisible. The surface of the photograph itself is a persistent subject of interest for Tillmans, and his careful combination of small and large formats, and framed and unframed prints, serves to underscore the notion of the photographic image as an object―subjective and idiosyncratic. The chalk dust covering the façade and grounds of a West Virginia limestone-grinding factory alludes to the photographic surface, as chalk is used in the printing process to absorb ink. This work is juxtaposed with a seascape in which a man plunges into the waves. Frozen at a fast shutter speed, the splashes of water―another integral element in inkjet printing―no longer appear liquid, but rather take on a solid mineral appearance.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong, Duration 26/3-12/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com