CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/26/2015

Wolfgang Tillmans: Abstract Pictures

"The underpinning of my work has always been the use of the photographic medium and everything it offers in order to make a new picture," Wolfgang Tillmans is quoted in Hatje Cantz's new paperback edition of the classic compendium, Abstract Pictures. "That is the only thing that I feel responsible for. I believe that all times and every historical situation allows for the making of new things and demands a new response. These might be progressions of what has been going on before but there has to be something that is specific about the contemporary condition. If that is with or without the camera is ultimately not so relevant to me because all my work comes from a sense of curiosity and enquiry and experimentation. I use the word experimentation freely, even though I always shun it when it is used in relation to my abstract pictures. I have observed that as soon as the work is abstract, 'experimentation' automatically comes up. But for me every portrait sitting and every cityscape is just as much an experiment."