September 16 to October 24, 2015
525 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 727 2070

Clothes cascading from a washing machine, with the compositional grace of court drapery.The world upside down from the perspective of a baby held by a man with a beer in his other hand, her arms and legs flared out in joy. Men’s limbs packed abstractly into a picture frame as a hand rummages inside red shorts.

The imagery of Wolfgang Tillmans is deceptively artless. There are over 100 new works in his show and most could be shown with his work of 20 years ago with no break in style. Within his parameters, however, he constantly tests ideas about photography all the while documenting friends and his immediate environment one moment, activist and gay subcultures the next. In times like our own when lifestyles and personas are so carefully mediated and “curated”, all awkwardness edited out, Tillmans’ quiet insistence in framing content that is gritty, quotidian, or overlooked becomes a bulwark against slick image control.

Tillmans’ first published photographs, of Hamburg nightlife, came out in the British magazine i-D in 1988, a moment when hierarchies of art world, fashion and magazine cultures were being redefined. (Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition also happened in 1988, for instance, as artists sought to sidestep the art establishment). i-D magazine was started by former Vogue art director Terry Jones; intrigued by the punk scene, he wanted a forum that reflected street fashion and genuine youth culture. i-D’s acknowledgement of diversity and idiosyncratic beauty were expressed through its photography and design choices and it became a precursor to European ‘anti-fashion’ magazines such as Purple Prose and, in their early years, Self Service and The Face. This ‘realist’ aesthetic was refined by photographers Corinne Day, Jurgen Teller, Terry Richardson, David Sims, and Nigel Shafran, many emboldened by the fearless work of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark in the US and Araki in Japan.

Though Tillmans had been influenced earlier by northern British bands and the sophisticated album covers of Peter Saville, the new ‘realism’ had seeped into music and magazine culture as Tillmans night clubbed and studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in the UK between 1990-1992. It is significant after only eight years he became the first photographer and non-British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize.

Tillmans understood early the need for the avoidance of closure. Each image is a result of micro decisions, from “how would I take a picture of this?” to making a final edit that is not too easy or familiar, and appears to contribute to his hidden compositions that often have a slow reveal. He restlessly recontextualizes his work, each installation constituting, in itself, a separate art piece, the exhibition a labor of relationships between architectural space, images and scale. At his Zwirner show there is a photograph of presentation in progress, studio still life, a, 2013, with large prints covering walls, but then unexpectedly smaller pictures high, creeping up to the ceiling en masse like a colonizing army of ants. Tillman’s makes no distinction between his work appearing in a magazine spread, commercial gallery or fine art museum. Prints are unframed, taped or pinned to the walls. From the outset he used context as a tool for his own ends, ignoring preset rules about how photographic work should be presented or given value. His career has also straddled the divide between analogue and digital photography with remarkable integrity and grace, which this show now emphasizes.

Tillmans lives and works between London and Berlin, and the sensibilities of both cities inform his vocabulary. Tender, candid, intimate portraits of friends and their abstracted body parts, still lives of fruits, or activists in gritty streetscapes are all shot frankly, often in overcast, northern light. But he works hard to make the audience work too. With Patti Smith, Glastonbury, 2015, we see domed camping tents under the grey festival sky and it takes time to figure out that the distant angled projector screens filled with Smith’s face are her oblique portraits.

In Simon, Sebastian Street, 2013, is a portrait of one of his closest friends whose knowing gaze is directed at the camera. The image is so low key it is hard to figure out what the pull is, why it is compelling. Only a study of the elements around him reveal that the lights above his head and the lines of the table radiate from a vanishing point that ends at the eyes, giving the compositional aura of a Renaissance saint. We revisit other old friends of the artist, Alex and Lutz, who in another i-D magazine story from 1992 appeared refreshingly raw and liberated sitting semi-naked in trees with long, open PVC coats. Twenty-three years later they look at us in Alex and Lutz, Hindenmithstrass, 2012, with the same unabashed matter-of-factness and close cropped hair, the past co-existing seamlessly with the present.

Different from Tillmans portraits are the exploratory and process driven ‘Silver’ series, which reveal his imaginatively technical side. These are experiments with the alchemy of photography where residue and silver particles are re-photographed, or alternatively left physically on top of the image, expanding concepts of photography as image or object. His photograph as object would have sat nicely alongside work in Peter Bunnell’s 1970 landmark show ‘Photography Into Sculpture’ at MoMa, with exquisite work by late ’60s and early ’70s artists such as hugely influential UCLA teacher Robert Heinecken, who worked outside traditional ideas of photography; Richard Jackson,who used negatives as sculptural forms; and the young Ellen Brooks who re-mixed photography and other materials into new objects.

Tillmans is an outlier, very different from the previous generation of German photographers like Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer, influenced as they were by Bernd and Hilla Becher and their attendant high seriousness. Critics accused him, in the 90s, of photographing shallow, vacuous, unimportant subject matter, but there is no corresponding surface dispassion or lack of depth to his work to accord with this criticism. The random, slightly chaotic nature of his compositions captures meaning and tenderness and accumulates in his oeuvre into a form of romanticism. Tillmans has indeed said that photography was a way to deal with “bearing the meaninglessness of everything”.

A striking, large inkjet print has been given pride of place in one gallery. It shows a common garden weed growing between mossy paving stones. The colors are lush and nuanced as only the best printing can give, with rich dark greens and purples. Caught in a ray of diffused light, the weed is erect, plucky and fragile. It describes perfectly Tillmans concerns, that beauty is there right beneath our noses, unexpected and between the cracks. You just have to look.

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Eva Díaz, Ken Johnson and Chloé Rossetti joined David Cohen to discuss exhibitions of Lorna Williams, Wolfgang Tillmans, Alexi Worth and Brock Enright, June 7, 2013 at the National Academy Museum

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The recently-converted 5thfloor galleries at Gagosian uptown have mostly been given over to sprawling group shows of market-driven talent. The space, a low-ceilinged fluorescent-lit warren of former offices, verily hums with chilly attitude. Curator Tom Duncan, a gallery registrar, now brings art history into the mix with this adventurous photography survey, pairing historical and contemporary examples of sculptural construction and assemblage as subject matter.

The show’s timeline begins with experimental modernist works by two noted sculptors, American David Smith and Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy. Smith’s four exquisite miniature black-and-white gelatin silver prints, Untitled (Tableau) (1931-1933), first appear as Max Ernst-like surrealist painted landscapes, but on prolonged viewing reveal themselves to be arrangements of real organic forms, coral and twigs found on a trip to the Virgin Islands. Moholy-Nagy, in his little-seen early vanguard color work from 1936-1946, exploits his then-new medium’s theatrical qualities, capturing prismatic light as it reflects off plastic armatures hung in black space. Both artists move photography away from its traditional reportorial definition—toward more open formal abstract readings.

Jumping ahead to the 1980s, works by the Swiss collaborative team of Peter Fischli & David Weiss and also by American James Welling seem intentionally “academic” and “arch” by comparison. Fischli & Weiss’s Blossoming Branch (1986), a tabletop arrangement of stacked metal clamps, a plastic bottle, an aluminum cooking pan and a dust broom, has all the “traditional” compositional elements of a Picasso bronze. Welling, in his studio studies of drapery, exploits the chiaroscuro qualities of black-and-white printing to willfully static effect, more like Dutch still-life painting.

Cindy Sherman’s two large works from 1992 are brazen and provocative by comparison.Untitled (1992) is a horrific portrayal of a figure made up of prosthetic limbs and disattached body parts, its face in agony, seemingly in the midst of a sexual assault from an equally distended aggressor. Sherman exploits photography for all its visceral immediacy; she constructs “fictional” self-identities only in order to make them “real” all over again.

Gregory Crewdson follows the radicalism of Sherman’s “set-up” strategy to its logical ends in Untitled (butterflies with braids) (1997). Yet his results are staid by comparison. The medium-scale glossy color print shows human hair blond braids hanging amidst a dark grove of trees, covered with blue taxidermy butterflies in the foreground. The lighting, saturated palette and cinematic “staging” provide for an overall mood of ersatz surrealist horror.

The younger practitioners follow Crewdson’s self-conscious lead, especially Anne Hardy, who makes mock-ups of windowless rooms and loads them with signifying objects: a makeshift lab with beakers, pipettes and notational charts, for example. For her, a lot of effort is exerted creating narrative-looking content that doesn’t lead anywhere.

Roger Ballen, working in black-and-white at a modest scale, also feels quite stilted, with his diorama arrangements of cardboard boxes, animal skulls, a live kitten, child-like scrawled drawings on the walls behind. His work has the psychological flavor of Joel-Peter Witkin’s earlier genre-defining efforts (he’s not in the exhibit), but without the hardcore goods.

In the end, it is Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968) who is the star of the show. His works are interspersed among the first three rooms, and they all come across relaxed and intelligent without ever working too hard. At the entrance, Beerenstilleben (2007), a modestly-scaled color print, shows empty plastic food containers sitting on a windowsill bathed in light: it is an absolutely considered and casual moment. Beauty is returned once again to the realm of a photographer’s “eye” as opposed to surrounding conceit. For Tillmans, meaningful abstraction exists all around us in the realm of the everyday. He doesn’t need polemical purpose.

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February 26, 2006 – May 29, 2006

Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at PS1, entitled Freedom From The Known, features a new series of large scale abstract photographs. Some are unique while others are based on the artist’s previous imagery. This is the first museum show in the US for Tillmans, a German-born, London-based artist whose work came to international prominence during the 1990s. Freedom From The Known is consistent with Tillmans’s oeuvre in the sense that it was conceived as an installation, and there’s a lot to see. However, this show departs from his previous gallery presentations wherein photographs were directly taped or clipped to the wall with deliberate informality. Images displayed at PS1 are framed behind glass or encased in plexiglass boxes.

The major new works develop a theme of abstraction that has run parallel to Tillmans’s better known iconographic images since the beginning of his career. They are up to ten feet high. To achieve them, Tillmans manipulated enormous sheets of chromogenic C print paper with light in the darkroom. Such images are typically described as camera-less, meaning that no negative was used. One huge C print entitled “it’s only love give it away” featured crisp black lines suggestive of eyelashes or feathery magnetic forces swaying above soft purple tones. Others conveyed quite different romantic yet industrial moods through their use of unpredictable colors, compositions, and titles. Titles play a strong role in Tillmans’s work and should never be overlooked.

Meanwhile, as if to apply an opposite principle to balance the impact of these big C prints, Tillmans juxtaposed some small photocopies of his own images and a xeroxed newspaper article. Viewers unfamiliar with Tillmans’s oeuvre will be quickly clued in to its heterodox, destratified approach to image making and image output when confronted with such extreme contrasts of image content, size, and media in one gallery. This artist’s longstanding interest in the sources and materiality of pictures, as well as the variety of meanings that can be set in motion when iconography and abstraction interplay, are much in evidence throughout the show.

On display in another room, in yet another mode, a large C print entitled “Empire (Punk)” looks like a very large fax. Indeed it was a fax, once upon a time. The much degraded imagery of a young man began as a portrait taken by Tillmans, who faxed this portrait to create a new version of the image as a fax – following a logic  akin to that of Warhol’s photo-silkscreen prints. Then in 2005, Tillmans reworked the faxed image again, scanning it at high resolution in order to make a large C print. This print became part of a new series entitled Empire. (Other images from the Empire series include a crouching soldier handling a gun, the silhouette shadow of a man’s head, and an extreme close up of bearded skin.) Whereas the camera-less photographs are unique prints, the Empire series employs iconography and magnifies low-grade photographic reproduction technologies, such as faxed imagery, into the realm of  high tech, high art, and pure data.

In Freedom From The Known, Tillmans presents viewers with a surfeit of information that parallels the complexity of the world we move through and decipher everyday. As in his previous exhibitions, the diversity of photographic technologies becomes a subject in itself, one that plays a crucial role in the construction of disjunctive meanings and associations prompted by Tillmans’s unusual framing of people, places, and things. In this show, where iconography is less prevalent, Tillmans’s analytical process is much more evident. He has said that his approach to abstraction is rooted in an adolescent fascination with astronomy, a tantalizing insight into the mind of an artist who has always emphasized the sociopolitical dimension of his humanist sensibility. Freedom From The Known reveals that a fortuitous collision of empirical science and emotional sensitivity may be part of what fuels the burning energy beneath Tillmans’s investigation of photography, and life itself.

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