Wolfgang Tillmans

“From early images of socks drying on a radiator to more recent fields of glossy color created in the darkroom, all Tillmans’ work asks this question: how to make it new?” –The Guardian

This publication accompanies Fondation Beyeler’s survey on the great photographic innovator Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968). Tillmans first made a name for himself in the early 1990s, with photographs that captured an entire generation and a youth culture of which he was part, and which are now iconic images of that era. However, he quickly expanded his focus, creating works with and without a camera, producing photographs printed as C-prints on photographic paper, as inkjet prints on paper, or as photocopies. Some of these photographs acquire a sculptural, objectlike quality. Tillmans has also developed new compositional and formal, anti-hierarchical ways of installing his pictures in spaces. This substantial, clothbound volume offers a comprehensive overview of his achievements.

Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) began his career in photography documenting Hamburg’s rave scene in the late 1980s. His earliest images were printed on digital copiers, and in the mid-1990s, living in London and then New York, Tillmans began to foreground the lo-fi properties of his printed images by exhibiting them pinned or taped to gallery walls. In 2005, at an exhibition at Maureen Paley gallery titled Truth Study Center, he further extended this approach by exhibiting photographs alongside newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and other kinds of printed matter, on custom-made wooden vitrines. This installation also brought to the fore more political themes in Tillmans’ photography. In 2011 he traveled to Haiti to document reconstruction efforts following the previous year’s earthquakes.