Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg / Truth Study Center / Wolfgang Tillmans

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Symbol and allegory are artistic strategies Tillmans is usually keen to avoid. The State We’re In, A 2015 is a departure from this stance: the work’s title is a direct reference to current global political tensions. Depicting the Atlantic Ocean, a vast area that crosses time zones and national frontiers, it records the sea energised by opposing forces, but not yet breaking into waves. Differing energies collide, about to erupt into conflict. Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I was first presented as part of the 10th edition of Manifesta , the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which was held in St. Petersburg in 2014. The artist explains the context for Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I in a feature published in i-D Magazine: "I had to find a way to make a comment. I included [in Manifesta 10] two photographs of ugly new Orthodox churches, built by the government. I also photographed television static in my Saint Petersburg hotel room as a symbol of censorship and of potential loss of connection. These became two huge pictures in the show." 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).

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) presented Wolfgang Tillmans: Rebuilding the Future, a major exhibition curated by Tillmans, Rachel Thomas, IMMA’s senior curator, and Sarah Glennie, director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Although the artist’s work has been included in group shows at IMMA, first in 1997 and most recently in What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, which featured his work Central Nervous System (2013) as the exhibition poster, this will be Tillmans’s first individual presentation at the museum and his first solo project in Ireland. 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.Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, from 1990 to 1992. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, an award given annually by Tate in London. From 2003 to 2009, Tillmans served as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. In 2009, he was selected to serve as an artist trustee on the board of Tate. He has been a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, since 2012 and was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2013. Tillmans was the recipient of the 2015 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and in January 2018, he was awarded the Kaiserring (Emperor’s Ring) prize from the city of Goslar in Germany. Tillmans was named one of the TIME100 Most Influential People of 2023. Tillmans's artistic work is based on an irrepressible curiosity, intensive preparatory research and continual engagement with the technical and aesthetic potential of the medium of photography. His visual language is characterized by a close observation that opens up a deeply humane approach to our surroundings. Familiarity and empathy, friendship, community and closeness can be seen and felt in his pictures. In a poetic passage in the book, the Irish novelist Eimear McBride describes her reaction to Tillmans’s exhibitions: Communal spaces, people, animals, and still-life studies of nature or food are just some of the subjects that feature in Neue Welt. Seen together, these images offer a deliberately fragmented view. Rather than making an overarching statement about the changing character of modern life, Tillmans sought only to record, and to create a more empathetic understanding of the world.

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.

But beneath that, it’s also a perfect representation of the many entangled themes that awaits listeners. Joining Fragile at Kantine am Berghain for his live debut in Germany will be the New York based visual artist, rapper, singer, songwriter and producer DonChristian Jones. His work spans musical and time based performance, rap mixtapes, video and public murals, blending genres of painting and hip hop, referencing classical and contemporary styles. Much of his work today is informed by his time spent painting murals on Rikers Island with youth inmates. Don has shown and performed at The Whitney Museum, MoMA Ps1, Webster Hall, Dancespace, Center for Performance Research, and was an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida. “Where There’s Smoke”, released in July 2018, is DonChristian’s first studio album.

Benjamin Britten: War Requiem, ENO at National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying),Kaohsiung City, Taiwan Oftentimes in queer literature, the queer character on the cover is seen alone, solo, or maybe looking alittle bit downcast,” says the author of Shuggie Bain, the 2020 debut novel that roared, winning the Booker Prize and critical accolades galore. ​ “And that’s even the case with Shuggie Bain – here’s alittle boy who’s literally being crucified. That’s the symbolism of him, alone in this landscape.”

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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.” 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. In the run-up to the European elections in May 2019 artists, writers and creatives who feel passionate about the European project come together during the Forum on European Culture in Amsterdam from May 31- June 3. During the 4-day Eurolab, they examine what has gone wrong in the communication of, and about the EU and how to make a new and powerful beginning.

In the mid-late 80s, he bought a cheap camera, and embarked on his photography journey. He established a name for himself with his photos covering the gay club scene and red-light district in Hamburg (most of which were published primarily by i-D, if you really look hard enough you can find them floating around). The artist’s first traveling solo exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans: View from above, presented his work at four museums across Europe. Following its debut at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the show traveled to Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and finally the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring previously unpublished works and contributions by Zdenek Felix, Ida Gianelli, Jerôme Sans, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Poul Erik Tojner; the publication includes a conversation between Tillmans and Nathan Kernan, and an essay by Giorgio Verzotti. 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.

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As mundane as the above pictures may look to some, to others they are very powerful pieces, a criticism that has persisted throughout all of Tillmans’ work since his early days. For Tillmans, a lot of life is actually remarkable if we (as a society) would just pay attention. Today Is The First Dayexpands upon Tillmans’s highly considered approach to exhibition making, in which the installation is conceived to develop the experience of the work and amplify the artist’s perspective. Curated by Devrim Bayar and Dirk Snauwaert, this show reflects questions about visibility—as both a perceptual and political idea—that are central to the artist’s practice. Among the questions raised are: When does something become perceptible? What is the relationship between what we perceive and what we know? And what impact do new technologies have on how we see the world? The Museum of Modern Art will present Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the artist’s first museum survey in New York, from September 12, 2022 through December 31, 2022. Unique groupings of approximately 350 of Tillmans’s photographs, videos, and multimedia installations will be displayed according to a loose chronology throughout MoMA’s sixth floor. Organized by Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan and Phil Taylor, the exhibition will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art following its run at MoMA. The photograph Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I (2014) by Wolfgang Tillmans was included in the group exhibition Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition presented works made by 15 artists during the last decade which had recently entered the museum's collection.