PHOTO:Wolfgang Tillmans-Lumière Du Matin
Throughout his career Wolfgang Tillmans has challenged the potentiality of making pictures and has brought a new kind of subjectivity to photography. He explores traditional genres such as portraiture, still life, or landscape with a constant interest in the limits of visibility by pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique, thus questioning the existing values and hierarchies.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Chantal Crousel Archive
Wolfgang Tillmans presents a solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel. His artistic practice attributes central importance to the observation of people, their relationship to one another, and their connection to the things around them. These subjective relations and modes of perceiving bodies, images, materials, or surfaces are undergoing massive shifts in light of the current health crisis, calls for social distancing, and the relocation of our everyday life and interaction into virtual space. Wolfgang Tillmans has increasingly focused his attention on this changing relation whether by differentiating the materiality of paper and its perception through different forms of presentation, framing, and representation, devoting his time to print colors and processes, or working with image definition and resolutions that far surpassed the capabilities of the human eye. Time and again it is the conditions and limits of what is visible in relation to other forms of sensory experience, time and again it is the status of photography oscilla- ting between analog and digital forms of production and representation that become virulent in the process.
Wolfgang Tillmans lives and works in Berlin and London. He studied at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design from 1990 to 1992. In 2000, he was the first photographer and non-British artist to be awarded the Turner Prize; in 2013, he became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts; and in 2015 he received the Hasselblad Award. Tillmans became known in the early 1990s for his idiosyncratic photographs of popular and youth culture. Since then, his work has expanded to include various genres and photographic practices. Along with still lifes, portraits, landscape and sky photographs, he has developed several abstract photo works that explore image carriers and exposure processes. Since the 2000s, his work has been shown in large solo museum exhibitions and from 2012 to 2013 in a comprehensive retrospective that toured South America. In 2014, installations by Wolfgang Tillmans were shown at the 8th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10. In the runup to the Brexit referendum, Tillmans got involved in politics for the first time. He designed posters that reminded people to register to vote and advocated for United Kingdom to remain in the EU. His ads and posters for the German federal elections in 2017 called for more voter participation to keep the percentage of votes for right-wing nationalist parties as low as possible. Due to EU-wide political shifts to the right and concomitant anti-EU sentiments in many countries, he initiated the “Protect the European Union” poster campaign, which was translated into twenty-three languages. In the spring of 2018, together with Stephan Petermann and Rem Koolhaas, he called on artists and creatives across the EU to participate in a campaign for the 2019 European parliamentary election. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Tillmans collaborated with Between Bridges on developing the project “2020 Solidarity”, which aims to help cultural and music venues, social projects, independent spaces, and publications whose existence has been threatened by the current crisis by selling posters designed by different artists. In recent years, Tillmans has been increasingly focused on music, producing his own songs and music videos and appearing as a musician and DJ. Since 2006, Wolfgang Tillmans has been operating the non-profit exhibition space Between Bridges, which was first based in London and opened in Berlin in 2014.
Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans, Airbag (Ia), 2020, © Wolfgang Tillmans, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Maureen Paley, David Zwirner and Chantal Crousel
Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration: 6/5-12/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.crousel.com
