Wolfgang Tillmans

The observation of people—their bodies, movements, relation to surroundings—lies at the core of the diverse oeuvre that German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) has amassed over the past three decades. Today, these haptic relations and interactions are undergoing massive shifts in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and technological change, as the necessity of social distancing and the migration of everyday life into virtual space transforms how we interact with one another.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Sound Is Liquid reflects on the photographer’s oeuvre against the backdrop of these societal developments. Accompanying an exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) in Vienna, Austria, this catalog features a wide selection of Tillmans’ work from his early photographs produced in the pop-culture milieu of the 1990s to his acclaimed photographic abstractions, his high-resolution images of the globalized and digitalized reality of the early 21st century, and photos taken shortly before and during the coronavirus pandemic.

This volume offers a panoramic collection of interviews and writings from an artist for whom language has always been a significant means of creative expression. Arranged chronologically, the assembled texts reflect Tillmans’ thinking on photography, music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality and activism. The sources are as varied as their content, with statements and conversations that originally appeared in exhibition catalogues rubbing up against social-media posts and song lyrics.

Whether discussing his own work as a photographer or drawing out the thoughts of others, Tillmans is a generous interlocutor with a refreshing clarity of thought. This visually rich and timely publication tracks Tillmans’ contributions to art and cultural criticism in tandem with the social and cultural shifts of the past 30 years.

Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is among the most influential contemporary artists, and the impact of his work registers across the arts, intersecting with fashion, music, architecture, the performing arts, and activism. Known for his genre-defying practice and ongoing investigation into the photographic medium, Tillmans is the recipient of the Turner Prize (2000) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015). His foundation, Between Bridges, supports the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBTQ rights.

“Wolfgang Tillmans is not only a great artist, he’s a joyous intellectual whose generosity, wit and good-natured skepticism is political, authentic and playfully profound. Read this volume and marvel at his highbrow yet unpretentious theories on abstraction combined with a low-level appreciation of the down and dirty. Thrill to Wolfgang’s magically elitist yet of-the-people reinvention of ‘real’ photography and weep at the beauty of his love for the ‘unforeseen.’ Can printed museum art-talk be so smart that it becomes sexually arousing for the reader? Sure it can. And this is just the book to prove that.” –John Waters

“For over 30 years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been surveying culture and politics, as attentive to the production of news as he is to the radical intimacies of the nightclub or protest. Through his lens the world recovers its complexity. In an era of dangerous simplifications, we need his work more than ever.” –Olivia Laing

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer’s experience.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans’ work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist’s career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is among the most influential contemporary artists, and the impact of his work registers across the arts, intersecting with fashion, music, architecture, the performing arts and activism. Tillmans is the recipient of the Turner Prize (2000) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015). His foundation, Between Bridges, supports the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBTQ rights.

Though he is best known for his portraiture and observational depictions, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) has simultaneously created abstract photography over the past 30 years. Dubbed his Silver works, these photographs expand the boundaries of photographic processes, taking what others might call accidents in the photo development process—like stains from trace chemicals and the titular silver nitrate—and using them in a deliberate compositional manner. The result is a series of images that Tillmans describes as “stained, impure, bright, [and] unstable.”
In this artist’s book, Tillmans’ Silver works are brought together for the first time. In addition to high-quality reproductions of the works themselves, Saturated Light includes photographic documentation of the pieces in exhibition settings and as elements of installations. An essay by art theorist Tom Holert discusses the philosophical, aesthetic and material questions that Tillmans’ Silver series pose.

Conceived and designed by German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968), this richly illustrated artist’s book explores the latest developments in Tillmans’ work over the last three years. Today Is The First Day conveys his richly diverse approach to image-making, video, performance, music and political activities, and also features newly commissioned texts from contributors—including novelist and author of The Lonely City Olivia Laing, historian and essayist Brian Dillon, curator Catherine Wood and geologist Dr David Chew—each of whom illuminate a different aspect of Tillmans’s work.

The book includes over 30 pages featuring his set design for the English National Opera’s production of War Requiem; recent portraits such as his now iconic image of Frank Ocean; and detailed installation views that allow us to see in-depth Tillmans’ imaginative approach to exhibition installation.

According to photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968), “for the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine while to watch it in air, landing or taking off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” With no text other than the inner-front flap’s description, this fifth printing of Tillmans’ now iconic artist’s book (first published in 1997) consists of 62 color photographs of the Concorde airplane—taking off, landing or in flight, and sometimes as just a tiny, birdlike silhouette in the sky. The photographs speak of both the beauty and the environmental devastation produced by this fabled French airplane, both sides of which Tillmans captures in his casual yet formally elegant signature style.

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.