Latest news with #WolfgangTillmans
LeMonde
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- LeMonde
Wolfgang Tillmans' photography in action
"They have arrived," wrote visual artist Wolfgang Tillmans in French on his Instagram account on May 16, captioning a photograph showing trucks in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It was a curious ballet: Since mid-March, the National Museum of Modern Art has been emptying its permanent collection, dispersing it among various institutions and storage sites during a major renovation of the building that is set to last five years. Yet here were new works arriving, all by the 56-year-old German contemporary artist, who had been invited by the institution to create the Centre Pompidou's final exhibition before the renovations began. From June 13 to September 22, within the 6,000 square meters of the Public Information Library (Bpi), visitors can immerse themselves in Tillmans' work. Spanning more than three decades, this ever-evolving body of work brims with avenues for reflection and is marked by a strong political commitment (pro-LGBT, pro-European, pro-reception of refugees), while at the crossroads of various photographic genres (landscape, portrait, abstraction, documentary).
The Guardian
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wild rodents, fascist warnings and a haunted carpet: Wolfman Tillmans storms the Pompidou
In September the Pompidou Centre in Paris closes for five years for renovation. The building is nearly 50 years old and needs to be cleared of asbestos, and to reconnect with Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers' original design after years of architectural accumulations. Many of the departments are already moving into temporary new homes, including the huge Bibliothèque publique d'information, the public library usually based on the second floor. Nearly all of its contents have been emptied out, but before it's stripped back altogether, Wolfgang Tillmans has been invited to deconstruct it another way. His show, Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait (Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us) covers all 6,000 sq metres of the space. It's an inspired setting because Tillmans' work circles around questions of information. He makes documentary photographs but questions the parameters of photographic vision. In his ongoing Truth Study Center he collates newspaper cuttings, photographs, photocopies, drawings and objects on trestle tables, encouraging viewers to consider these elements and their claims to veracity; his installations are always site-specific, and take a nuanced approach to display. Situated in the Bpi, Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait is a meditation on knowledge, how it is organised, and where its limitations lie. 'I do trust my eyes, I want to trust observation, study, but for that it is very important that I sharpen my eyes to how I see, how we record, what we capture,' says Tillmans. The artist had been invited to show work from throughout his 40-year career, but this isn't a retrospective and it isn't arranged chronologically. Instead it's a response to the space, and it's a space with a big personality. The Pompidou's distinctive blue pipes snake across the ceiling and a bold carpet covers the floor, mostly grey, with some lime green stripes and squares, and the occasional stain. The carpet also features purple patches in seemingly abstract designs; this is an even older carpet, already there when the grey one was added in 2000. The fitters cut around bookshelves and partitions to lay the grey and so, when those fixtures were removed, a ghostly imprint of the library was revealed. For Tillmans the resulting palimpsest suggests a photographic negative, and it's something he was keen to keep; elsewhere he's retained shelving, library books, magazines, the photocopying room, tables, individual study booths and signage. The vacated BPI requires an exceptionally talented – and prolific artist – but Tillmans makes it look easy. Celebrated images such as Moon in Earthlight (2015) share wall space with the fire extinguishers; a long, thin corridor suggesting a rat run is home to a mid-1990s series on a street rodent. Some of the images are displayed at very large size, such as The State We're In, A (2015), a documentary shot of a paradoxically ever-changing sea, or Panorama, right (2006), and Panorama, left (2024), which each measure six metres long. These huge works are cheek-by-jowl with much smaller images, even postcard dimensions, creating a physical experience worlds away from same-size online viewing. Some prints are framed, some clipped up, some stuck to the wall, each suggesting questions about how photography isolates what it shows. Not that Tillmans is sniffy about mass-reproduction. Vinyl-printed versions of the Panorama images are also installed in Berlin's Berghain nightclub, the exhibition booklet informs, while tables towards the end of the space gather his work with magazines, including Arena Homme+ and Butt. There are also tables devoted to his photobooks, one displaying every spread of 1997 publication Concorde, a testament to 1960s techno-utopianism and cross-channel co-operation. At the end of the exhibition there's a BPI reading table, complete with reading lights, and his monographs free to flip through. In the Autoformation ['Self-education'] booths there are videos on demand, allowing visitors to explore as they choose. Elsewhere are reproductions of image and text pieces Tillmans circulated online and as posters, exhorting readers to vote Remain, or against Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump. Some of these images and texts made it on to T-shirts, and there are photographs of people wearing them. 'What is lost is lost forever,' reads a rallying cry about Brexit, a message the march of time has made forlorn. Nothing could have prepared us, though on the other hand Tillmans did try. Tillmans isn't anti-technology at all, speaking excitedly at the press view of the new possibilities afforded in the 2000s by ever-faster digital cameras. One of the intriguing aspects of this show is seeing how consistent his interest in technology has been, with very early works such as distorted black-and-white photocopies from 1988 sitting happily alongside contemporary prints. A final room is a sound installation, 2018's I want to make a film, in which Tillmans narrates a potential project looking at digital technologies, while another installation, Travelling Camera (2025), hovers across the back of a digital 4k screen, a usually hidden infrastructure he has dotted with found fragments such as seashells and postage stamps. It's not kit for the geeky sake of it, as evidenced by a large photograph of Russian troops in Moscow, shot in 2005. Tillmans is asking what we know, and how; what we notice, or are shown, and what remains obscure. At the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until 22 September
The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Each shot feels like a private performance': Rene Matić, the Turner shortlist's only photographer
Rene Matić's nomination for the 2025 Turner prize was announced the week this exhibition opened. Only one photographer has ever been awarded the prize – Wolfgang Tillmans. Matić is not a technically masterly photographer, but a quiet observer of things, like Tillmans. Matić riffs on a documentary, diaristic style of photography, with snapshots of everyday moments and poetic juxtapositions, which are then used to create installations, grouping images to surreptitiously bring out buried tensions and paradoxes. Where those tensions have often been urgent and angry in Matić's previous exhibitions, this new show highlights another facet of their work. It is perhaps Matić's most personal exploration yet. Although these installations are evocative slices of life, it's the whiteness of the gallery's walls and ceiling that you notice first. Their sharp, stark white engulfs the contrasting small-scale obsidian pictures, scattered across the wall like dark gems on a pristine beach. The whiteness is overbearing and cold, but it also emphasises the lustrous quality of the black-and-white pictures. This plays symbolically into Matić's concern with the rubric of whiteness in British society, and how blackness lives within, alongside or outside it. Their images describe what many of us mixed-race people in the UK experience as being in-between, something Matić has termed 'rude(ness)'. The simple choice, to make the pictures small and place them sparsely on the white wall, makes you experience this 'rude(ness)' concept visually. Blackness and whiteness are important to Matić's identity. They are also important in making a photograph. These images are the result of Matić's first forays into the darkroom, developing silver gelatin prints. The care this involved was fitting for the pictures, which are all personal – showing the artist's inner circle. They portray a journey inwards and towards those closest, to the people and things that make a person who they are. As the title suggests, there are intimate images of family members, friends, partners, self-portraits. It is all explored with the feeling of being close enough to reach out to one another: in one, Touching Campbell's Face, Matić does just that. The portraits, particularly the one of a heavily pregnant friend, are about how bodies of loved ones can be entire worlds. There are also shadows, hinting at the absent, unknown parts of ourselves, made visible by the light. There are cultural objects that have shaped Matić's understanding of their own identity: a vintage first-edition copy of James Baldwin's Another Country reclining in a luxurious heap of rumpled bedsheets and pillows; a Nina Simone vinyl record; a lineup of Matić's collection of figurines by St Martin de Porres, the 16th-century Peruvian lay brother canonised as the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking racial harmony. By formal standards, the photographs are mostly good. What makes them interesting is the way Matić arranges them, sometimes placed coming towards each other, sometimes heightening the tensions of difference, moving against each other. Some of the sequences are looser. Four images side by side portray a friend and frequent muse, the playwright Travis Alabanza, wrapped in a white towel; and another friend Grace, backstage before a performance at Ugly Duck, a LGBTQIA+ arts organisation in London. The Simone record. We see another friend, Mia, at the kitchen table, a nod to Carrie Mae Weems. Mia is surrounded by empty bottles – the air seems thick with the intimacy of a late-night moment. Each feels like a private performance for Matić's camera. In another image, another kind of implied performance, Matić's blond wig and black platform shoes are cast off, abandoned on the floor. The sensation is of Matić shrugging off the mask, feeling safe. Matić's body throughout remains only half-revealed, though: smoky, soft images of their legs, their shadows. In one image, we see the photographer's reflection in a mirror, holding the camera, an apparition above a clutch of cherished family pictures at their granny's house. A reconciliation of sorts comes in paired mother and father portraits, both shown holding cigarettes. At this point, you realise what else this show is telling you: it all begins with love. At Arcadia Missa, London, until 3 June.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Inside the Eccentric Japanese-Inspired Studio of a Beloved Berlin Artist
Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music. Despite recent waves of gentrification, Berlin is still a city full of artists. While some (including Wolfgang Tillmans and Katharina Grosse) are world-renowned, it's another cast of characters who keep the city strange and unpredictable. There's the avant-garde choreographer Florentina Holzinger, for example, known for staging operas with plentiful fake blood, and the 82-year-old fashion knitwear designer Claudia Skoda, who's often seen out at nightclubs. Then there's the artist Oliver Prestele, 52, who can be spotted around town wearing fluffy dog-hair hats and giant wooden clogs. Long obsessed with all aspects of traditional Japanese culture, he is one of the city's most passionate ceramists, a co-owner of some of its most successful Japanese restaurants and a gatherer of people. At the weekly Sunday dinners he hosts at his atelier, one might meet any number of creative Berliners, from the Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo to the German Japanese classical violinist and artist Ayumi Paul. Located in the Uferhallen, a canal-side complex of artists' studios in the developing Wedding neighborhood, Prestele's 2,000-square-foot, two-floor space contains a glassed-in room that he uses as a ceramics studio and a large open kitchen and fermentation laboratory lined with plants and pottery. Last year, he made soba noodles there every Sunday until he was satisfied that they were perfect. On the second-floor mezzanine, he's installed an irori, a traditional Japanese sunken hearth, where he sometimes cooks nabe, Japanese hot pot. Born and raised in a small village in Bavaria, Prestele moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study product design at the Berlin University of the Arts, where one of his professors, a Japanese sculptor, instilled in him a fascination with Japan. After leaving university, he traveled to that country as often as he could, obsessively teaching himself to cook ramen. In 2001, he built a wooden ramen cart and began serving noodles in different spaces around Berlin's then-gritty Mitte neighborhood. 'Everything about it was illegal,' he says. He soon began catering for photographers including Peter Lindbergh, and in the mid 2000s, Prestele partnered with the Vietnamese restaurateur Ngu Quang Huy to open the ramen restaurant Cocolo, which now has two locations. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
