For his first exhibition in Portugal, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Remscheid, Germany) continues to expand the possibilities for the reception of his oeuvre through a radical repositioning of its multiple dimensions. At Serralves, he pays particular attention to what he describes as his ‘Vertical Landscapes’, photographs of the natural phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth, cloud meets sky. Dating from 1995 until the present, and printed in scales ranging from the standard size of photographic printing paper, to the panoramic expanse of four metres in size, the photographs encapsulate the expressive potential of Tillmans’ highly developed visual formalism, and his engagement with photography as inherently physical as it is immaterial. In their unnerving beauty, produced partially by the camera makers technical advances and partly by the photographer’s insistence on allowing those advances to show, they create a challenge to the canon of visual cool preeminent in today’s visual culture.

The exhibition will be site specific, in its response to the particular architectural context of its presentation in the museum and through the inclusion of new photographic material. It will also allude to ideas of the ‘universal’ through the everywhere-ness of sky and water, in which glimpses of the human body and particular social, natural and architectural situations and places from around the world emerge. Presented as a visual and architectural intervention across 1000 sq metres of the Serralves Museum’s galleries, together with a suite of installations of newly produced video works, the exhibition promises to be an immersive environment of threshold states.

Since establishing his reputation in the youth and club culture of 1990s London, Tillmans has become one of the most influential artists of our time. His continued exploration of photography as a means to communicate reality is one that inspires and moves in its wonder and its intelligence. For Tillmans, reality is not only visual, social, economic and political, it is organic, bodily, and phenomenal, from the bodies of friends and family to the constellations of cities and plants, the celestial galaxies of night skies and the exquisite abstractions created from the impact of light in photographic process itself. If the medium of photography and its processes provide the foundation to Tillmans’ work, his engagement with place, and his choreographic use of space and scale constitute a world, in which images of people and places and object-like registrations of light are part of an interconnected, physical and cosmic whole.

‘Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Verge of Visibility’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, assisted by exhibition curator Paula Fernandes.

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What’s wrong with redistribution? Wolfgang Tillmans. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ “truth study centre” became a fixed part of his exhibitions since he first showed a version of the multi-part tabletop installation in 2005. Often arising from local circumstances and current issues at the time of their creation, the “truth study centre” works mark an endeavour to create a clear view in ever more confusing times.

Tillmans observed the paradigm shift that defines politics today early on. The scope and complexity of this project become apparent for the first time through this book, the second we have published, after “manual” in 2007, dedicated to this set of works. Over 320 pages, printed using a high-resolution technique, Tillmans presents an alternative chronology of the present. Far exceeding his original and main medium of photography, he juxtaposes a variety of contrary opinions, statements and comparisons on recurring table formats. The dimensions of the wooden tables, which he designed himself, are not arbitrary: they are built using standard British door panels, 198 cm long, and with one of four different standard widths.

This book gives an overview, through lavish reproductions, of this new form of collage, in which picture, text and object “are only kept in place by their own weight.” An essay by Thomas McDonough, Professor for Art History at Birmingham University, New York, places Tillmans’ project within the context of twentieth-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg.

This artist’s book, produced by Tillmans’ Berlin atelier, includes a Fresnel magnifying glass, making it possible to zoom in on the contents and read even the smallest of printed texts. The largest installation of “truth study centre” to date will be shown in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof beginning November 28, 2015.

€48.00

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“I wanted to show how cars appear in typical street view, which is rarely the subject of photographs. Cars are usually avoided in photography – one waits until a car has exited a view. The ordinary presence of cars is rarely worthy of representation. It’s always the special car, or the extreme traffic jam or, of course, the exciting crash that is being pictured. The Cars pays tribute to the shapes and forms we look at every day. How much time we spend with them, sitting inside them, the endless hours we stare at a dashboard. Even if we don’t own a car ourselves, their presence is unavoidable. Cars are everywhere. Their sheer number is the most crazy thing about them. They appear in our lives with excessive omnipresence. In their volume cars intrude upon public space, and the way they occupy streets and open areas is rarely challenged. Virtually wherever there are people, there are cars and they are visually intermingling in whatever we see. We are looking at the world from a car and cars are in the foreground, the background or in between of what is in our view. Where they are, they add a tone, a note, a presence, a noise to the setting they’re in. […]”

€ 19.80

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Camera Austria #122

Featuring:

Shirana Shahbazi
Wolfgang Tillmans
Stephanie Kiwitt
Heinz Peter Knes
Michele Robecchi
Mark Durden
Vanessa Joan Müller
Oscar Faria
T.J. Demos

English / German

Price: €16

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Art Review #67

April 2013

Berlin: The final installment of our three-part guide to the city’s art scene.

Wolfgang Tillmans: The World Through My Lens

Design: A special focus on the relationship between design and art, featuring Maurizio Cattelan, Karl Lagerfed, Konstantin Grcic and many more.

D 9.50€

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Neue Welt by Wolfgang Tillmans, Taschen.

Over the period of more than two decades, Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the medium of photo-imaging with greater range than any other artist of his generation. From snapshots of his friends to abstract images made in a darkroom without a  camera or works made with a photocopier, he has pushed the photographic process to its outer limits in myriad ways. For this collection of photos, his fourth book with Taschen, Tillmans turned away from the self-reflexive exploration of the photography medium that had occupied him for several years by focusing his lens on the outside world—from London and Nottingham to Tierra del Fuego, Tasmania, Saudi Arabia, and Papua New Guinea. He describes this new phase simply as “trying out what the camera can do for me, what I can do for it.” The result is a powerful and singular view of life today in diverse parts of the world, seen from many angles. Says Tillmans, “My travels are aimless as such, not looking for predetermined results, but hoping to find subject matter that in some way or other speaks about the time I’m in.”

The book features a fascinating conversation between the artist and Beatrix Ruf, director of Kunsthalle Zurich.

The exhibition “Wolfgang Tillmans. Neue Welt / Wolfgang Tillmans. New World” will be on show at the Kunsthalle in Zurich from 1 September to 4 November 2012.

D 29,99€

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FESPA Digital / Fruit Logistica.

Vor einem guten Jahr besuchte Wolfgang Tillmans die Berliner Messe “Fruit Logistica”, das führende Branchentreffen der internationalen Fruchthandelswelt. “Dort gingen mir die Augen über angesichts der verrückten Displays und der Vielfalt und Komplexheit des internationalen Fruchthandels und seiner Verarbeitungsmaschinen. Darauf reagierte ich sofort mit der Kamera, habe die Bilder aber dann erstmal liegen lassen, um sie mit Abstand betrachten zu können, obwohl ich gleich an ein Künstlerbuch im “Concorde”- Format dachte”. Jetzt liegt es vor!

D 19.80 €

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Frieze d/e #3

Frieze d/e is a fully bilingual German/English magazine with its own editorial team and independent content. d/e stands for ‘Deutsch’ and ‘English.’ With editing and production based in Berlin, the new magazine offers in-depth coverage of contemporary art and culture throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland while closely following the international artist communities in this region.

D 8.50 €

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Wolfgang Tillmans – Serpentine Gallery

The Catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 26 June – 19 September 2010.

Exhibition curated by Julia Peyton-Jones.

First Person Mag #3 “Realness”

CONTRIBUTIONS: Billygoat, Crocodiles, DailyServing, Limi Feu, Sublime Frequencies / Omar Souleyman, Gemini Editons, Karl Haendel, William Kentridge, Sandy Kim, Magnolia Tapestries,Hitoshi Matsumoto, Agnes Montgomery, New High (M)art, Katja Rahlwes, Steven Shearer, Zoe Strauss, Wolfgang Tillmans

78pages
English