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, Wolfgang 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 Efi Michalaroy
Photo: MuCA Archive
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The exhibition “Fragile” presents a selection of over two hundred works from 1986 to 2020 by Wolfgang Tillmans. The work of Wolfgang Tillmans occupies an essential place in international contemporary art. Since her first exhibitions and publications in the 1990s, Tillmans has continuously developed her practice; he constantly questions photography as image and object, whether integrating it into a museum space or printing it in a publication. His work is based on an indomitable curiosity, preparations based on intensive research, a constant awakening and the permanent development of the medium with its technique and aesthetic potential. His language of images is based on precise observation which allows profoundly human access to the complexity of the world. Trust, empathy, friendship and closeness are visible and palpable in Tillmans’ images. Tillmans’ posture can be heard as a call to freedom and as an invitation to meet the other, without fear but with open curiosity. Tillmans produces photographs, installations, videos, and music that push the boundaries of the visible, revealing alternative modes of perception that impart subtle insights into the very foundations of our coexistence and desires. His open-mindedness and rejection of any one-dimensional perspective render unconsidered postulates of truth just as questionable as absolute standpoints or authoritarian attitudes. The resulting works demonstrate the will to form communities, to interact with others, to engage in self-reflection and thus overcome rigid (aggregate) states. Closely observing people, their relationships, and their connection to the things all around them is of central importance to Tillmans’s work. Our interpersonal relations and modes of perceiving bodies, images, materials, and surfaces are currently undergoing far-reaching changes as our everyday lives are increasingly relocated into virtual space. In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has increasingly turned his attention to this ever-changing relationship between haptics and optics, between body and gaze – whether addressing the materiality of paper and its perception by way of varying forms of presentation, framing, and depiction; exploring different printing processes and inks; or experimenting with degrees of focus and resolution that far exceed our eyes’ capabilities. His works thus repeatedly address the conditions and limits of the visible in relation to other forms of sensory experience, inquiring into the status and role of photography between analogue and digital forms of production and representation.
Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel-Paris
Info: MuCAT (Le Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara), Rond-point de la Mairie, Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Duration: 21/1-13/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 9:00-18:00, https://mucat.net
