Exhibition dates: 29th March – 19th July 2015
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
Mario Gandelsonas (American born Argentina, b. 1938)
Marta Minujín (Argentine, b. 1943)
Project for Transformador de cuerpos, Buenos Aires
1966
Pencil and ink on paper
28 1/2 × 42″ (72.4 × 106.7cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the architects
Dynamic. Evocative. Essential. Surreal. Modern. Beautiful. Intelligent. Futuristic. Transitional. Vernacular (as in architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than public or monumental buildings). Elitist. Monumental.
Cities in Transition. Urban Laboratories. Utopia. Here’s a posting as visual spectacle.
Marcus
.
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The unprecedented urbanisation of Latin America after World War II became the catalyst for exceptional architectural innovation. Countries in the region dealt with the challenges of modernisation – from housing rapidly growing city populations to increasing production in the inland territories – even as many were rocked by struggles between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Whole cities, from Brasilia, the new capital of Latin America’s largest country, to Ciudad Guayana, in the Venezuelan interior, were realised with breathtaking speed and became showcases for modernist architectural design. As the Cold War divided the globe into hotly contested zones of influence and the idea of a “third world” emerged, the region became key to the concept of the developing world.
As early as the 1940s, spectacular architectural designs in Brazil had captured attention worldwide. From the mid-1950s on, experimental architectural cultures appeared in a broad range of countries, from Argentina and Chile in the south to Venezuela and Mexico in the north. After the revolution in 1959, Cuba offered a countermodel to capitalist development. New attitudes toward public space, the relationship of building to landscape, and the role of the nation-state led to bold new architectural forms and solutions. Throughout the period architects in Latin America were deeply entwined with developmentalism, the doctrine that the state should promote modernisation and industrialisation in all aspects of life.
Latin America in Construction is itself a construction site of histories of modern architecture in Latin America. Over the last four years the curatorial team has culled archives and architectural offices throughout the region to gather original documents – design and construction drawings, models, photographs, and films – to open for reconsideration the achievements and legacy of this era. New materials have been created for the show: anthologies of period documentary films researched and edited by filmmaker Joey Forsyte, photographs by Leonardo Finotti, and large-scale interpretive models made by student teams at the University of Miami and, under the direction of the group Constructo, at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. The exhibition is intended to challenge the notion of Latin America as a testing ground for ideas and methods devised in Europe and the United States. It brings to light the radical originality of architecture and urban planning in the vast region during a complex quarter century.
Installation views of Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (March 29-July 19, 2015)
Photographs by Thomas Griesel
© 2015 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Amancio Williams (Argentinian, 1913-1989)
Hospital, Corrientes, Argentina
1948-1953
Perspective view, 1948
Oil on paper
Unframed: 25 9/16 × 37 5/8″ (65 × 95.5cm)
Amancio Williams Archive
Affonso Eduardo Reidy (Brazilian, 1909-1964)
Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
1934-1947
Gelatin silver photograph
© Núcleo de Documentação e Pesquisa – Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Lina Bo Bardi (Brazilian born Italy, 1914-1992)
São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), Sao Paulo, Brazil
Nd
Drawing. Graphite, and ink on paper
Unframed: 18 9/16 x 27 1/2″ (47.2 x 69.8cm)
Completed 1968
© Instituto Lina Bo e Pietro Maria Bardi
Rogelio Salmona (Colombian, 1929-2007)
Hernán Vieco (Colombian, 1924-2002)
Social Housing Complex in San Cristobal, Bogotá, Colombia
1963-1966
Gelatin silver photograph
Unframed: 8 × 10″ (20.3 × 25.4cm)
Fundación Rogelio Salmona
Esguerra Sáenz y Samper
Luis Ángel Arango Library (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango), Bogotá, Colombia. Cover plan of concert hall
1965
Vittorio Garatti (Italian, b. 1927)
Cuba Pavillion, Montreal, Canada
1968
Gelatin silver photograph
© Archivo Vittorio Garatti
Ricardo Porro (Born Cuba, died France 1925-2014)
National School of Plastic Arts, Havana, Cuba
1961-1965
Gelatin silver photograph
© Archivo Vittorio Garatti
Brasilia under construction, 1957. Geofoto. Arquivo Publico do Distrito Federal
Amancio Williams (Argentine, 1913-1989)
Hall for visual spectacle and sound in space Buenos Aires, Argentina
1942-1953
Photomontage
Unframed: 9 7/16 × 7 1/16″ (24 × 18cm)
Amancio Williams Archive
On the 60th anniversary of its last major survey of modern architecture in Latin America, The Museum of Modern Art returns its focus to the region with Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980, a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, from Mexico to Cuba to the Southern Cone, between 1955 and 1980. On view March 29 through July 19, 2015, Latin America in Construction is organised by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, and Patricio del Real, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA; Jorge Francisco Liernur, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; with the assistance of an advisory committee from across Latin America.
In 1955 MoMA staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark exhibition highlighting a decade of architectural achievements across Latin America. Latin America in Construction focuses on the subsequent quarter-century, a period of self-questioning, exploration, and complex political shifts in all the countries included: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. During these years Latin American countries created startling works that have never been fully granted their place in accounts of the history of modern architecture. Latin America in Construction brings together, for the first time, more than 500 original works that have largely never been exhibited, even in their home countries. These include architectural drawings and models, vintage photographs, and films from the period collected from architecture and film archives, universities, and architecture offices throughout the region. Highlighting the extent to which the exhibition contributes to new interpretations of Latin American architecture of the period, several research teams – in addition to the invited curators – have worked over the last five years to develop analytical models and compilations of rarely seen film footage. These historical materials will be displayed alongside newly commissioned models intended to highlight the spatial invention of some of the period’s masterworks of architecture, and to underscore the exploration of new forms of public space. Large-scale models of key structures have been commissioned for this exhibition from Constructo, a cultural organisation working with the workshops of the Catholic University of Chile, along with models of buildings and their landscapes fabricated by the University of Miami, and both the exhibition and the catalogue feature a group of new photographs by the Brazilian photographer Leonardo Finotti.
Latin America in Construction begins with some of the most telling architectural projects of the years leading up to 1955 in drawings, models, and photographs, as well as an evocation in period films of the rapidly changing rhythm and physiognomy of urban life in major cities such as Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Mexico City, and Havana. These attest to the region’s breathtaking pace of change, modernisation, and shift toward the metropolis. The exhibition is bookended by these historical films in the first gallery and, in the final gallery, a dynamic display of present-day snapshots of sites in the exhibition, submitted by Instagram users.
Urban Laboratories
Beginning in the late 1940s, planning for new campuses for the national universities of Mexico and Venezuela announced radical new thinking in which a modernist campus became not only a laboratory for new educational ideals, but also a fragment of an ideal future city that would explore themes related to local traditions and climate. The term “Cuidad Universitaria” was born, changing the relationship between university and city. Projects in Latin America in Construction range from the universities at Concepción, in Chile, and Tucámen, in Argentina, to Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, and the National University in Bogotá. From the campus laboratory to the fully realised new city, a section of the exhibition is devoted to one seminal example of modern urban planning in Latin America: Brasília. From 1956 to 1960, Oscar Niemeyer led the newly created Companhia de Urbanização da Nova Capital (NOVACAP) to move the Brazilian capital from Rio de Janeiro to the savanna of the central plateau. In a national competition to plan a city for a half-million inhabitants, the jury selected Lucio Costa’s plan, which is exhibited in Latin America in Construction alongside very different visions from Brazilian architects Villanova Artigas and Rino Levi. Costa’s design was structured around two main axes: one of civic representation, focused on the Plaza of the Three Powers, which would come to feature Niemeyer’s Congress building; the other a bowed axis centered on a complex transportation spine connecting the horizontal spread of the superquadras (urban residential superblocks). The bus terminal was placed at the intersection of the two axes, to be surrounded by the commercial, recreational, and cultural sectors, realising a long-held modernist dream of a city centred on infrastructure and movement.
Cities in Transition
While the spectacular development of Brasília was heralded, transformations of older cities were just as dramatic. The exhibition looks at examples such as Rio de Janeiro, where new relations between monumental public buildings, landscape design, and natural settings were forged in a spectacular redesign recasting the image of the city and its fabled landscape; the creation of a new civic centre at Santa Rosa de la Pampa in Argentina, where architecture helped restructure the administration and the experience of the country’s vast interior; and the recasting of portions of the Chilean coastline at Valparaíso to accommodate an expanded Naval Academy.
Also surveyed are buildings in the late 1950s and early 1960s that created a new permeability between interior and exterior space, eroding traditional boundaries of the public realm. Many of these buildings also have complex incorporation of diverse functions within a great urban block, notably Lucio Costa’s Jockey Club in Rio de Janeiro and the Teatro San Martín in Buenos Aires, which grew to pierce through a block in the city’s grid and incorporate a range of cultural functions. Clorindo Testa’s great Bank of London in Buenos Aires, one of the masterpieces of the period, created an entirely new type of urban building block with its theatrical linking of interior spaces to the public realm of the street and sidewalk. Compelling new ideas for cultural buildings as complex structures – not set apart from the city, but interwoven within it – are also featured, from Lina Bo Bardi’s art museum in São Paulo and Clorindo Testa and Francisco Bullrich’s National Library in Buenos Aires, to Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro González de León’s Tamayo Museum in Mexico City.
A look at innovations in architecture for schools throughout Latin America includes Juan O’Gorman’s projects for radically modern elementary schools across Mexico in the early 1930s, new educational buildings and programs built in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the great open hall of João Batista Vilanova Artigas’s Architectural Faculty in São Paulo, and the intertwining of classroom spaces and a great protected playground in the Belgrano school in Córdoba, Argentina. Latin America in Construction also explores the inventive flourishing of new models of church architecture in many Latin American countries, notably those of Uruguay’s Eladio Dieste; public investment in major stadiums, leading to some of the most impressive structural achievements of advanced engineering; and the development of the coastline of every country in this exhibition, particularly as the rapid expansion of airplane travel transformed spatial relations among and within countries and fuelled the development of tourism.
Housing
After World War II, Latin America emerged as one of the most sustained and innovative regions in terms of state investment and new thinking in housing design. One wall of the exhibition comprises a timeline of important housing initiatives intermixing state sponsored (public) housing with middle-class housing built by the private market. A major example is the United Nations-supported Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI; Experimental Housing Project) in Lima, Peru, a neighbourhood of low-cost experimental housing conceived in 1966 by the British architect and planner Peter Land. In contrast to the superblock model, PREVI proposed the development of projects that could be partially built at the outset and then extended over time by the inhabitants as they gained greater resources or changed needs. Rather than a single master plan, Land chose an array of projects, resulting in a neighbourhood with units designed by emerging international talents in middle-income housing, including Christopher Alexander (USA), Kikutaki, Kurokawa, Maki (Japan), Oskar Hansen (Poland), Candilis, Josic, Woods (France), and many others. Land’s original slides are included in the exhibition.
The growing prosperity of the middle class in many Latin American countries ushered in a golden period of design for the individual family house, often combined with innovative garden design. While the emphasis of the exhibition is on public architecture and collective housing, it also includes an array of some of the most innovative and accomplished of the countless examples of architects designing houses for themselves or their family members, with examples by Agustín Hernández Navarro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Juan O’Gorman, and Amancio Williams.
Export
While Latin American architectural history has largely been written in terms of the importation of styles and techniques developed in Europe and the United States, Latin America in Construction seeks to bring attention to the internationalisation of many Latin American practices. Beginning with the New York World’s Fair of 1939, exhibitions have played a major role in showcasing the innovative forms and attitudes embodied in much Latin American work. Several examples of Latin American pavilions are featured in the exhibition, including Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s Venezuelan Pavilion for the 1967 Montreal Expo and Eduardo Terrazas’s Mexican Pavilion for the 1968 Triennale di Milano. More permanent and sustained exportations of Latin American architectural expertise are also examined. As countries studied new trade relationships in the realms of economy and politics, architecture in Latin America developed a more international set of practices. Seen as part of the Third World after World War II, Latin America was also an exporter of aid in the form of expertise, buildings, and plans, from Mexico providing schools to countries throughout the world (including Yugoslavia, India, and Indonesia) to Lucio Costa’s design for a new city in Nigeria.
Utopia
As in the rest of the world, in Latin America 20th-century utopian thinking often involved a radical embrace or rejection of the accelerating pace of industrialisation and the national embrace of technology. For some, technologies offered the possibility of conceiving entirely new spatial relations – even the occupation of Antarctica, as seen in a 1981 perspective for Amancio Williams’s Project for La primera ciudad en la Antarida (The first city in Antarctica). For others, technology contained an intrinsic dystopian failure, to be addressed with sharp criticism – as seen in eight collages from the series Collages Sobre la Cuidad, (1966-1970) by the Venezuelan architect Jorge Rigamonti, which reflect on the dark underside of his country’s obsession with the development of its oil economy. A number of archival photographs and materials from the School of Architecture at Valparaíso are also on view, illustrating the school’s radical refusal of the prevailing values of a technological future in the search for an architecture of poetics.
Press release from the MoMA website
Miguel Rodrigo Mazuré (Peruvian, 1926-2014)
Hotel in Machu Picchu, Machu Picchu (Project)
1969
Perspective
© Archivo Miguel Rodrigo Mazuré
Miguel Rodrigo Mazuré (Peruvian, 1926-2014)
Chavez House, Lima
1958
Gelatin silver photograph
© Archivo Miguel Rodrigo Mazuré
Jorge Rigamonti (Venezuelan, 1940-2008)
Caracas Transfer Node 2
1970
Photocollage
9 1/4 × 15″ (23.5 × 38.1cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund
Augusto H. Álvarez (Mexican, 1914-1995)
Banco del Valle de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico
1958
Gelatin silver photograph
Unframed: 8 1/4 × 11 11/16″ (21 × 29.7cm)
Archivo de Arquitectos Mexicanos, Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Nil Ató d Méi
Enrique de la Mora (Mexican, 1907-1978)
Elite Building Office and Commercial Building Mexico City, Mexico
Nd
Drawing, pencil and sanguine on sketch paper
Unframed: 18 × 24″ (45.7 × 61cm)
Archivo de Arquitectos Mexicanos, Fondo: Enrique de la Mora y Palomar, Ftd d Aitt Uiidd Nil Ató d Méi
Lucio Costa (Brazilian born France, 1902-1998)
Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian, 1907-2012)
Joaquim Cardozo (Brazilian, 1897-1978)
Project Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil
1958-1961
c. 1958
Gelatin silver photograph
Unframed: 39 3/8 × 39 3/8″ (100 × 100cm)
Marcel Gautherot / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Marcel André Félix Gautherot (Brazilian, 1910-1996)
Ministries under construction Brasilia, Brazil
c. 1958
Gelatin silver photograph
Unframed: 39 3/8 × 39 3/8″ (100 × 100cm)
Marcel Gautherot / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Unknown photographer
Oscar Niemeyer. Cathedral Under Construction, Brasilia, Brazil
Nd
Gelatin silver photograph
Marcel André Félix Gautherot (Brazilian, 1910-1996)
Congresso Nacional, Brasília National Congress Building
1958-1960
View of the inverted dome structure during construction c. 1958
Gelatin silver photograph
Unframed: 39 3/8 × 39 3/8″ (100 × 100cm)
Marcel Gautherot / Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Brasília
The idea of moving Brazil’s capital from Rio de Janeiro to the central plateau was born in colonial times and a federal district was declared shortly after independence in 1889, but a site for the new city was chosen only in 1955. The following year the newly elected president, Juscelino Kubitschek, declared his intent to have Brazil advance fifty years in five. Oscar Niemeyer was named director of architecture and urbanism for the new city. He built the presidential palace and announced a national competition for an urban plan for a city of half a million inhabitants. From twenty-six entries, the international jury selected Lucio Costa’s plan. Costa’s design was structured around two main axes, one of civic symbolism, terminating in the Praça dos Três Poderes (Plaza of the three powers), the other – with a gentle curve to it – an axis of the daily functions of the city, a highway spine flanked by housing organised in verdant neighbourhood blocks (superquadras). The main bus terminal was placed at the intersection of the two axes, to be surrounded by the commercial, recreational, and cultural sectors, realising a long-held modernist dream of a city centred on infrastructure and movement. Niemeyer’s designs developed along the lines set out by Costa – a great esplanade lined with nearly identical buildings for the ministries and exceptionally sculptural designs for a cathedral, museum, and library. Although far from complete, Brasília was an irreversible reality at its inauguration in 1960.
Emilio Duhart (Chilean, 1917-2006)
The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), Santiago, Chile
1962-1966
Courtesy PUC Archivo de Originales
Eladio Dieste (Uruguayan, 1917-2000)
Church in Atlantida, Uruguay
1958
Photograph: Leonardo Finotti © Leonardo Finotti
Marcelo Sassón
Eladio Dieste at Atlantida Church, Uruguay
c. 1959
Gelatin silver photograph
Archivo Dieste y Montañez
Lúcio Costa (Brazilian, 1902-1998) and Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian, 1907-2012)
Plaza of the three powers, Brasilia, Brazil
1958-1960
Photograph: Leonardo Finotti © Leonardo Finotti
Rogelio Salmona (French Colombian, 1929-2007)
Torres del Parque Residencial Complex, Bogotá, Colombia
1964-1970
Photograph: Leonardo Finotti © Leonardo Finotti
Eduardo Terrazas (Mexican, b. 1936)
Triennale di Milano, Mexican Pavilion
1968
Interior view with design based on Olympic logo by Terrazas and Lance Wyman and printed matter by Beatrice Trueblood
© Eduardo Terrazas Archive
Luis Barragán (Mexican, 1902-1988)
Torres de Satélite (1957), Ciudad Satélite, Mexico City, Perspective view of the towers
Undated
Colour chalk on cardboard
719 x 730mm
Barragán Archives, Barragan Foundation, Switzerland
© 2014 Barragan Foundation, Switzerland / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Juan Sordo Madaleno (Mexican, 1916-1985)
Edificio Palmas 555, Mexico City, Mexico
1975
Gelatin silver photograph
Photograph: Guillermo Zamora
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos
Walter Weberhofer Quintana (Peruvian, 1923-2002)
View of Atlas Building, Lima
1953
Gelatin silver photograph
© Archive Walter Weberhofer
Hermano Martin Corréa, Hermano Gabriel Guarda, Patricio Gross, Raúl Ramirez
Benedictine Monastery Chapel, Santiago, Chile
1964
Gelatin silver photograph
Courtesy PUC Archivo de Originales
Cover of Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
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Art Blart 
Exhibition: ‘Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017’ at Tate Modern, London
Tags: 17 Years Supply, a, abstract photography, Abstract Pictures, abstraction, activism, affection, Anders pulling splinter from his foot, architectural form, architectural form and function, Arms and Legs, astro crusto a, Atlantic Ocean, beauty, belonging, Berlin, Blushes, Book for Architects, Calle Real II, cameraless photographs, cameraless photography, CLC 800 dismantled, clubbing, Collum, Colourbox, Concorde, Concorde L433-11, Contemporary Photography, cultural attitudes, curatorial practice, destabilisation of the world, digital television, double exposure, Dusty Vehicle, Eleanor / Lutz, End of Broadcast I, Exposure, fake news, Faltenwurf (Pines) a, Fespa Car, frailty of the human body, freedom, gay, Gaza Wall, gender, German contemporary photography, german photographer, German photography, Greifbar, Greifbar 29, Headlight (f), HIV, HIV/AIDS, HM Prison Reading, homosexuality, human body, identity, Iguazu, images of the commonplace and the extraordinary, installation art, Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza, La Palma, Lampedusa, landscape, London Olympics, Market I, medium of expression, memento mori, Munuwata sky, nape of the neck, Neue Welt, NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN, nightlife, nightscape, Oscar Niemeyer, paper drop, paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse, photographic form, photographic paper, photographic processes, place, Playback Room, poetry, political marches, political marches and protests, politics, Port-au-Prince, portrait, portraiture, private and politica, queer, race, refugees, Saint Petersburg, self-consciousness, Sendeschluss, Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Separate System Reading Prison, sex, sexuality, Shit buildings going up left right and centre, Simon Sebastian Street, social and political themes, soft skin of the outer ear, Still life Calle Real II, still lifes, Studio still life c, Sunset night drive, talking about society, television white noise, the abstract and the representational, The Air Between, The Blue Oyster Bar, The Blue Oyster Bar Saint Petersburg, the body politics, The Cock (Kiss), the human soul, the physicality of the photograph, the private and political, The Spectrum Dagger, The State We’re In A, the world, Tillmans Abstract Pictures., Tillmans Blushes, Tillmans Book for Architects, Tillmans La Palma, Tillmans Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Tillmans The State We’re In A, time, traces light, Transient 2, truth study center, truth study center project, Tube escalator joint, visual archive, voyeurism, vulnerability, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wolfgang Tillmans 17 Years Supply, Wolfgang Tillmans Anders pulling splinter from his foot, Wolfgang Tillmans Apple tree, Wolfgang Tillmans Arms and Legs, Wolfgang Tillmans astro crusto a, Wolfgang Tillmans Book for Architects, Wolfgang Tillmans Calle Real II, Wolfgang Tillmans CLC 800, Wolfgang Tillmans CLC 800 dismantled, Wolfgang Tillmans Collum, Wolfgang Tillmans Concorde, Wolfgang Tillmans Concorde L433-11, Wolfgang Tillmans Double Exposure, Wolfgang Tillmans Dusty Vehicle, Wolfgang Tillmans Eleanor / Lutz, Wolfgang Tillmans Faltenwurf (Pines) a, Wolfgang Tillmans Fespa Car, Wolfgang Tillmans Gaza Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans Greifbar, Wolfgang Tillmans Greifbar 29, Wolfgang Tillmans Headlight (f), Wolfgang Tillmans Iguazu, Wolfgang Tillmans Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, Wolfgang Tillmans JAL, Wolfgang Tillmans Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza, Wolfgang Tillmans La Palma, Wolfgang Tillmans Lampedusa, Wolfgang Tillmans London Olympics, Wolfgang Tillmans Market I, Wolfgang Tillmans Munuwata sky, Wolfgang Tillmans Nackt 2, Wolfgang Tillmans Neue Welt, Wolfgang Tillmans New World, Wolfgang Tillmans NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN, Wolfgang Tillmans Nude 2, Wolfgang Tillmans Oscar Niemeyer, Wolfgang Tillmans paper drop, Wolfgang Tillmans paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse, Wolfgang Tillmans Playback Room, Wolfgang Tillmans Port-au-Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Wolfgang Tillmans Separate System Reading Prison, Wolfgang Tillmans Shit buildings going up left right and centre, Wolfgang Tillmans Simon Sebastian Street, Wolfgang Tillmans Still life Calle Real II, Wolfgang Tillmans Studio still life c, Wolfgang Tillmans Sunset night drive, Wolfgang Tillmans Tag/Nacht II, Wolfgang Tillmans The Air Between, Wolfgang Tillmans The Blue Oyster Bar Saint Petersburg, Wolfgang Tillmans The Cock (Kiss), Wolfgang Tillmans The Spectrum Dagger, Wolfgang Tillmans The State We're In A, Wolfgang Tillmans Transient 2, Wolfgang Tillmans truth study center, Wolfgang Tillmans Tube escalator joint, Wolfgang Tillmans Tukan, Wolfgang Tillmans Weed, Wolfgang Tillmans Young Man Jeddah, Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, Young Man Jeddah
Exhibition dates: 15th February – 11th June 2017
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The State We’re In, A (Room 14)
2015
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Cock (Kiss)
2002
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
If one thing matters, everything matters
(A love letter to Wolfgang Tillmans)
I believe that Wolfgang Tillmans is the number one photo-media artist working today. I know it’s a big call, but that’s how I see it.
His whole body of work is akin to a working archive – of memories, places, contexts, identities, landscapes (both physical and imagined) and people. He experiments, engages, and imagines all different possibilities in and through art. As Adrian Searle observes in his review of the exhibition, “Tillmans’ work is all a kind of evidence – a sifting through material to find meaning.” And that meaning varies depending on the point of view one comes from, or adopts, in relation to the art. The viewer is allowed to make their own mind up, to dis/assemble or deepen relationships between things as they would like, or require, or not as the case may be. Tillmans is not didactic, but guides the viewer on that journey through intersections and nodal points of existence. The nexus of life.
Much as I admire the writing of art critic John McDonald, I disagree with his assessment of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans at Tate Modern (see quotation below). Personally, I find that there are many memorable photographs in this exhibition … as valuable and as valid a way of seeing the world in a contemporary sense, as Eggleston’s photographs are in a historic visualisation. I can recall Tillmans’ images just an intimately as I can Eggleston’s. But they are of a different nature, and this is where McDonald’s analysis is like comparing apples and pears. Eggleston’s classical modernist photographs depend on the centrality of composition where his images are perfectly self-contained, whether he is photographing a woman in a blue dress sitting on a kerb or an all green bathroom. They are of their time. Times have changed, and how we view the world has changed.
For Tillmans no subject matter is trivial (If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters – the title of a 2003 exhibition at Tate Britain), and how he approaches the subject is totally different from Eggleston. As he says of his work, his images are “calls to attentiveness.” What does he mean by this? Influenced by the work of the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti whom I have also studied, a call to attentiveness is a way of being open and responsive to the world around you, to its infinite inflections, and to not walk around as if in a dream, letting the world pass you by. To be open and receptive to the energies and connections of the world spirit by seeing clearly.
Krishnamurti insightfully observed that we do not need to make images out of every word, out of every vision and desire. We must be attentive to the clarity of not making images – of desire, of prejudice, of flattery – and then we might become aware of the world that surrounds us, just for what it is and nothing more.1 Then there would be less need for the absenting of self into the technological ether or the day dreams of foreign lands or the desire for a better life. But being aware is not enough, we must be attentive of that awareness and not make images just because we can or must. This is a very contemporary way of looking at the world. As Krishnamurti says,
“Now with that same attention I’m going to see that when you flatter me, or insult me, there is no image, because I’m tremendously attentive … I listen because the mind wants to find out if it is creating an image out of every word, out of every contact. I’m tremendously awake, therefore I find in myself a person who is inattentive, asleep, dull, who makes images and gets hurt – not an intelligent man. Have you understood it at least verbally? Now apply it. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. And if anybody says something to you, you are tremendously attentive, not to any prejudices, but you are attentive to your conditioning. Therefore you have established a relationship with him, which is entirely different from his relationship with you. Because if he is prejudiced, you are not; if he is unaware, you are aware. Therefore you will never create an image about him. You see the difference?”2
.
Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. You are attentive and tremendously awake.
This is the essence of Tillmans work. He is tremendously attentive to the images he is making (“a representation of an unprivileged gaze or view” as he puts it) and to the associations that are possible between images, that we make as human beings. He is open and receptive to his conditioning and offers that gift to us through his art, if we recognise it and accept it for what it is. If you really look and understand what the artist is doing, these images are music, poetry and beauty – are time, place, belonging, voyeurism, affection, sex. They are archaic and shapeless and fluid and joy and magic and love…
They are the air between everything.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of room 4 (detail), which includes the latest iteration of the truth study centre project, with
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
The Tate show includes a room full of his “truth study centres”, which comprise often contradictory newspaper cuttings as well as photographs and pamphlets that aim to show how news is manipulated according to the political loyalties of those who produce it. As activists go, though, Tillmans is defiantly centre ground. “This is about strengthening the centre. I can understand left-wing politics from a passionate, idealistic point of view, but I do not think it is the solution to where we are now. The solution is good governance, moderation, agreement. Post-Brexit, post-Trump, the voices of reason need to be heard more than ever.”
Wolfgang Tillmans quoted in Sean O’Hagan. “Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘I was hit by a realisation – all I believed in was threatened’,” on The Guardian website Monday 13 February 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Installation view of room 13 (detail), which focuses in on Tillmans’ portraiture with Eleanor / Lutz, a (2016) at right
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Eleanor / Lutz, a
2016
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Portrait of Wolfgang Tillmans, Tate Modern Boiler House, Level 3, 14/02/2017 in front of his works, Transient 2, 2015 and Tag/Nacht II, 2010
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tag/Nacht II
2010
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
What are we to make of the world in which we find ourselves today? Contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans offers plenty of food for thought.
This is Wolfgang Tillmans’s first ever exhibition at Tate Modern and brings together works in an exciting variety of media – photographs, of course, but also video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music – all staged by the artist in characteristically innovative style. Alongside portraiture, landscape and intimate still lifes, Tillmans pushes the boundaries of the photographic form in abstract artworks that range from the sculptural to the immersive.
The year 2003 is the exhibition’s point of departure, representing for Tillmans the moment the world changed, with the invasion of Iraq and anti-war demonstrations. The social and political form a rich vein throughout the artist’s work. German-born, international in outlook and exhibited around the world, Tillmans spent many years in the UK and is currently based in Berlin. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize.
Room one
Static interference typically appears on a television screen when an analogue signal is switched off. This can occur when a station’s official programme finishes for the night or if a broadcast is censored. In Tillmans’s Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast 2014 it represents the coexistence of two different generations of technology. The chaotic analogue static was displayed on a digital television, which allowed Tillmans’s high-resolution digital camera to record the pattern as it really appeared, something that would not have been possible with a traditional cathode ray tube television. This work shows Tillmans’s interest in questioning what we believe to be true: the seemingly black-and-white image turns out to be extremely colourful when viewed very close up.
Other works in this room reflect on digital printmaking and photography today. For example, the technical ability to photograph a nightscape from a moving vehicle without blurring, as in these images of Sunset Boulevard, is unprecedented. Itself the subject of many famous art photographs, this iconic roadway appears here littered with large format inkjet prints in the form of advertising billboards. In Double Exposure 2012-2013 Tillmans juxtaposes images of two trade fairs – one for digital printers, the other for fruit and vegetables. Encounter 2014 shows a different photo-sensitive process. A pot had been left on top of a planter preventing light from reaching the sprouts underneath and leaving them white, while the surrounding growths that caught the daylight turned green.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
107 1/2 × 161 1/2″ (273.1 × 410.2cm)
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Television white noise that the artist photographed while in Russia. For Tillmans, the image signifies resistance on his part to making clear images, but without the text its ostensibly radical nature would not be known.
Installation view of room 1 (detail), with Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, 2014, at left
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Double Exposure
2012-2013
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room two
Tillmans spends much of his time in the studio, yet he only occasionally uses it as a set for taking portraits. Instead, it is where prints are made and exhibitions are planned in architectural models, and where he collects materials and generates ideas. Over the years this environment has become a subject for his photographs, presenting a radically different view of the artist’s studio to the more traditional depictions seen in paintings over the centuries.
These works made around the studio demonstrate Tillmans’s concern with the physical process of making photographs, from chemical darkroom processes and their potential to create abstract pictures without the camera, to digital technology that is vital to the production of contemporary images, and the paper onto which they are printed. Tillmans’s understanding of the material qualities of paper is fundamental to his work, and photographs can take on a sculptural quality in series such as Lighter, 2005-ongoing and paper drop, 2001-ongoing, seen later in the exhibition.
In CLC 800, dismantled 2011 Tillmans uses photography to record a temporary installation, the result of unfastening every single screw in his defunct colour photocopier. He prefers to photograph his three-dimensional staged scenarios rather than actually displaying them as sculptures. He has often described the core of his work as ‘translating the three dimensional world into two dimensional pictures’.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Perhaps as a continuation of his more textural photographs – depicting fabrics and still lifes so close up they become difficult to read – experiments in abstraction followed suit, many of them featuring what is perhaps his favourite motif: the fold, which, as the exhibition’s curator Chris Dercon kindly reminded us, was considered by the philosopher Leibniz as one of the most accurate ways to depict the complexities of the human soul.
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso. “Inside Wolfgang Tillmans’s Superb Tate Modern Survey,” on the artnet website February 15, 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
CLC 800, dismantled
2011
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room three
Having spent the preceding decade working largely on conceptual and abstract photographs, in 2009 Tillmans embarked on the four-year project Neue Welt. Looking at the world with fresh eyes, he aimed to depict how it has changed since he first took up the camera in 1988. He travelled to five continents to find places unknown to him and visited familiar places as if experiencing them for the first time. Interested in the surface of things as they appeared in those lucid first days of being in a new environment, he immersed himself in each location for just a brief period. Now using a high resolution digital camera, Tillmans captured images in a depth of detail that is immediately compelling, but also suggests the excess of information that is often described as a condition of contemporary life.
Communal spaces, people, animals, and still-life studies of nature or food are just some of the subjects that feature in Neue Welt. Seen together, these images offer a deliberately fragmented view. Rather than making an overarching statement about the changing character of modern life, Tillmans sought only to record, and to create a more empathetic understanding of the world. Over the course of the project, however, some shrewd observations about contemporary worldviews did emerge. One related to the changing shape of car headlights, which he noted are now very angular in shape, giving them a predatory appearance that might reflect a more competitive climate.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
astro crusto, a
2012
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Installation view of room 3 (detail), with Headlight (f) 2012, at left; and Munuwata sky, 2011 at right
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Headlight (f)
2012
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Munuwata sky
2011
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room four
In the mid-2000s, prompted by global events, such as the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Tillmans became interested in the assertions made by individuals, groups or organisations around the world that their viewpoint represented the absolute truth about a number of political and ethical questions.
He began his wryly-named truth study center project in 2005. Photographs, clippings from newspapers and magazines, objects, drawings, and copies of his own images are laid out in deliberate – and often provocative – juxtapositions. These arrangements reflect the presentation of information by news outlets in print and online. They also draw attention to gaps in knowledge, or areas where there is room for doubt. For each installation, the material presented in the truth study centers is selected according to its topical and geographic context. In 2017, the subject of truth and fake news is at the heart of political discourse across the world. This iteration of the project focuses in particular on how constructions of truth work on a psychological and physiological level.
The Silver 1998-ongoing prints connect to reality in a different way. Made by passing monochromatically exposed photographic paper through a dirty photo-developing machine, they collect particles and residue from the rollers and liquids. This makes them, in effect, a record of the chemical and mechanical process from which they originate.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
truth study center
2017
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room five
Tillmans has described how, as a photographer, he feels increasingly less obligated to reflect solely on the outside world through documentary images. In his abstract works, he looks inwards: exploring the rudiments of photographic processes and their potential to be used as a form of self-expression.
Like the Silver works in the previous room, the abstract Greifbar 2014-2015 images are made without a camera. Working in the darkroom, Tillmans traces light directly onto photographic paper. The vast swathes of colour are a record of the physical gestures involved in their construction, but also suggest aspects of the body such as hair, or pigmentation of the skin. This reference to the figurative is reflected in the title, which translates as ‘tangible’.
Tillmans has observed that even though these works are made by the artist’s hand, they look as though they could be ‘scientific’ evidence of natural processes. For him, this interpretation is important, because it disassociates the works from the traditional gestural technique of painting. That the image is read as a photographic record, and not the result of the artist’s brushstroke, is essential to its conceptual meaning.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Greifbar 29
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room six
Tillmans is interested in social life in its broadest sense, encompassing our participation in society. His photographs of individuals and groups are underpinned by his conviction that we are all vulnerable, and that our well-being depends upon knowing that we are not alone in the world.
Tillmans has observed that although cultural attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality have become more open over the three decades since he began his artistic practice, there is also greater policing of nightlife, and urban social spaces are closing down. His photographs taken in clubs, for example, testify to the importance of places where people can go today to feel safe, included, and free.
This concern with freedom also extends to the ways in which people organise themselves to make their voices heard. Images of political marches and protests draw attention to the cause for which they are fighting. They also form part of a wider study of what Tillmans describes as the recent ‘re-emergence’ of activism.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Blue Oyster Bar, Saint Petersburg
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN free Gender Expression WORLDWIDE
2006
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room seven
Playback Room is a space designed for listening to recorded music. The project first ran at Between Bridges, the non-profit exhibition space Tillmans opened in London in 2006 and has since transferred to Berlin. In three exhibition (‘Colourbox’, ‘American Producers’ ‘Bring Your Own’) that took place between September 2014 and February 2015, he invited visitors to come and listen to music at almost the same quality at which it was originally mastered.
Whereas live music can be enjoyed in concert halls and stadiums, and visual art can be enjoyed in museums, no comparable space exists for appreciating studio music. Musicians and producers spend months recording tracks at optimal quality, yet we often listen to the results through audio equipment and personal devices that are not fit for perfect sound reproduction. Playback Room is a response to this. An example of Tillmans’s curatorial practice, he has chosen to include it here to encourage others to think about how recorded music can be given prominence within the museum setting.
The three tracks you hear in this room are by Colourbox, an English band who were active between 1982 and 1987. Tillmans, a long-term fan of the band, chose their music for Playback Room because they never performed live, thus emphasising the importance of the studio recordings.
Room eight
Tillmans began experimenting with abstraction while in high school, using the powerful enlargement function of an early digital photocopier to copy and degrade his own photographs as well as those cut from newspapers. He describes the coexistence of chance and control involved in this process as an essential ingredient in most of his work.
Ever since then, he has found ways to resist the idea that the photograph is solely a direct record of reality. In 2011, this area of his practice was compiled for the first time in his book Abstract Pictures. For a special edition of 176 copies Tillmans manipulated the printing press, for example by running it without plates or pouring ink into the wrong compartments, to create random effects and overprinted pages.
Some of his abstract photographs are made with a camera and others without, through the manipulation of chemicals, light, or the paper itself. Importantly, however, Tillmans does not distinguish between the abstract and the representational. He is more interested in what they have in common. The relationship between photography, sculpture and the body, for example, is expressed in abstract photographs made by crumpling a sheet of photographic paper, but also in close-ups of draped and wrinkled clothing such as Faltenwurf (Pines) a, 2016 in Room 9.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Concorde L433-11
1997
Ink-jet print
Tate
© Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Room nine
Artist books, exhibition catalogues, newspaper supplements and magazine spreads, posters and leaflets are an integral part of Tillmans’s output. These various formats and the ways in which they are distributed or made visible in the public space allow him to present work and engage audiences in a completely different manner to exhibitions. For him the printed page is as valid a venue for artistic creation as the walls of a museum. Many such projects are vital platforms on which he can speak out about a political topic, or express his continued interest in subjects such as musicians, or portraiture in general.
Recently, the print layout has enabled Tillmans to share a more personal aspect of his visual archive. Originally designed as a sixty-six page spread for the Winter 2015/Spring 2016 edition of Arena Homme +, this grid of images looks back at Fragile, the name he gave as a teenager to his creative alter-ego. Spanning 1983 to 1989 – the year before he moved to England to study – the photographs and illustrations provide a sensitive insight into a formative period in Tillmans’s life, predating the time when he chose photography as his main medium of expression.
The layout is also an example of the intricate collaging technique that he has employed in printed matter since 2011, deliberately obscuring some images by overlapping others on top of them
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Faltenwurf (Pines), a
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tukan
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room ten
An acute awareness of fragility endures across Tillmans’s practice in all of its different forms. Often this is expressed in his attentiveness to textures and surfaces. Collum 2011 is taken from Central Nervous System 2008-2013, a group of portraits featuring only one subject, where the focus on intimate details, such as the nape of the neck or the soft skin of the outer ear, both emphasises and celebrates the frailty of the human body.
Weed 2014, a four-metre tall photograph taken in the garden of the artist’s London home, invites us to consider the beauty and complexity of a plant usually seen as a nuisance. The dead leaf of a nearby fig tree appears as both a sculptural form and a memento mori. Dusty Vehicle 2012, photographed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is highly specific in its depiction of texture, yet the reasons leading to this roadside arrangement remain a mystery.
The focus on a very few works in this room serves as an example of Tillmans’s varied approaches to exhibiting his prints. Though best known for installations comprising many pictures, he always places emphasis on the strength of the individual image. By pinning and taping work to the wall, as well as using frames, Tillmans draws attention to the edges of the print, encouraging the viewer to interact with the photograph as an object, rather than a conduit for an image.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Dusty Vehicle
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Collum
2011
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Weed
2014
Photograph, inkjet print on paper
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room eleven
In this room Tillmans highlights the coexistence of the personal, private, public, and political spheres in our lives. The simultaneity of a life lived as a sexual being as well as a political being, or in Tillmans’s case as a conceptual artist as well as a visually curious individual, plays out through the installation.
The entirely white view taken from the inside of a cloud, a word charged with multiple meanings, is presented alongside the close-up and matter-of-fact view of male buttocks and testicles. Like nackt, 2 2014, the small photograph The Air Between 2016 is the result of a lifelong interest in visually describing what it feels like to live in our bodies. Here the attention lies in photographing the air, the empty space between our skin and our clothes.
In still life, Calle Real II 2013, a severed agave chunk is placed on a German newspaper article describing the online depiction of atrocities by Islamic State. The image is as startling in its depiction of the finest green hues as it is in capturing how, simultaneously, we take in world events alongside details of our personal environment.
This room, which Tillmans considers as one work or installation in its entirety, is an example of his innovative use of different photographic prints and formats to reflect upon how we experience vastly different aspects of the world at the same time.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Air Between
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Still life, Calle Real II
2013
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Nackt, 2 (nude, 2)
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room twelve
Tillmans has always been sensitive to the public side of his role as an artist, acknowledging that putting images out in the public world unavoidably places himself in the picture as well. His participation in activities such as lectures and interviews has been a platform for his voice from the beginning of his career.
Since 2014 he has also allowed performance to become a more prominent strand of his practice. Filmed in a hotel room in Los Angeles and an apartment in Tehran, Instrument 2015 is the first time that Tillmans has put himself in front of the camera for a video piece. Across a split screen, we see two separate occasions on which he has filmed himself dancing. The accompanying soundtrack was created by distorting the sound of his feet hitting the floor. In the absence of any other music, his body becomes an instrument.
On one side of the screen we see his body, on the other only his shadow. Referring to the shadow, New York Times critic Roberta Smith commented that:
“Disconcertingly, this insubstantial body is slightly out of sync with the fleshly one. It is a ghost, a shade, the specter that drives us all. The ease with which we want to believe that the two images are connected, even though they were filmed separately, might also act as a reminder to question what we assume to be true.”
Room thirteen
Portraiture has been central to Tillmans’s practice for three decades. For him, it is a collaborative act that he has described as ‘a good levelling instrument’. No matter who the sitter – a stranger or someone close to him, a public figure, an unknown individual, or even the artist himself – the process is characterised by the same dynamics: of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self-consciousness. Tillmans sees every portrait as resulting from the expectations and hopes of both sitter and photographer.
The portrait’s ability to highlight the relationship between appearance and identity is a recurring point of interest. In 2016, at HM Prison Reading, Tillmans took a distorted self-portrait in a damaged mirror once used by inmates. The disfigured result is the artist’s expression of the effects on the soul wrought by physical and psychological confinement and also censorship. Whoever looked into the reflective surface would gain a completely inaccurate impression of what they looked like, and how they are perceived by others.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968)
Separate System, Reading Prison
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Anders pulling splinter from his foot
2004
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
“The image’s reference to both Dorian Gray and Francis Bacon is evident. This catapults a new association: perhaps Bacon was painting Gray all along. Insistently, fearlessly, longingly.
As with much of Bacon’s oeuvre, and the very particular picture of Dorian Gray, a distorted, forward-facing male figure intimidates the viewer with his unmade face. However, Tillsman’s piece is not a picture, it is a photograph. Here, the artist (as was the case with Bacon/Wilde) is not the one dissembling what’s inside the frame, subjecting it with his brush. No. In Tillsman’s image, a piece of thick glass distorts the artist. Here, the artist is no longer the lens that is able to affect his surroundings. Here, the surroundings distort the artist.
The message Tillsman delivers is clear: things have changed. The world disfigures the subject while the artist is trapped, forced to stand there and watch.”
Text by Ana Maria Caballero on The Drugstore Notebook website [Online] Cited 07/06/2017. No longer available online
Room fourteen
Symbol and allegory are artistic strategies Tillmans is usually keen to avoid. The State We’re In, A 2015 is a departure from this stance: the work’s title is a direct reference to current global political tensions. Depicting the Atlantic Ocean, a vast area that crosses time zones and national frontiers, it records the sea energised by opposing forces, but not yet breaking into waves. Differing energies collide, about to erupt into conflict.
The photographs in this room deal with borders and how they seem clear-cut but are actually fluid. In these images, borders are made tangible in the vapour between clouds, the horizon itself or the folds in the two Lighter photo-objects. The shipwreck left behind by refugees on the Italian island of Lampedusa, depicted in this photograph from 2008, is a reminder that borders, represented elsewhere in more poetic delineations, can mean a question of life and death.
The text and tables sculpture Time Mirrored 3 2017 represents Tillmans’s interest in connecting the time in which we live to a broader historical context. He always understands the ‘Now’ as the history of the future. Events perceived as having happened over a vast gulf of time between us and the past, become tangible when ‘mathematically mirrored’ and connected to more recent periods of time in our living memory.
In contrast to the epic themes of sea and time, the pictures of an apple tree outside the artist’s London front door, a subject he has photographed since 2002, suggest a day-to-day positive outlook.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa
2008
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Lampedusa
2008
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Installation view of room 14 (detail), featuring at left, pictures of an apple tree outside the artist’s London front door and at right, La Palma 2014
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
La Palma
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Apple tree
2007
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Apple tree
Various dates
Ink-jet prints
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Book for Architects
Book for Architects 2014 is the culmination of Tillmans’s longstanding fascination with architecture. First presented at Rem Koolhaas’s 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, 2013, it explores the contrast between the rationality and utopianism that inform design and the reality of how buildings and streets come to be constructed and inhabited.
In 450 images taken in 37 countries, across 5 continents, Tillmans hones in on the resourceful and ingenious ways in which people adapt their surroundings to fit their needs. These are individual and uncoordinated decisions that were not anticipated in architects’ plans, but still impact the contemporary built environment.
Across the double projection, we see examples of how buildings come to sit within a city plan, the ad-hoc ways in which they are modified, and the supposed ‘weaknesses’ of a space such as the corners where there are service doors, fire escapes, or alarm systems.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Shit buildings going up left, right and centre
2014
Book for Architects Plate 083 2014
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Untitled
2012
Book for Architects 2014
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans has earned recognition as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. Tate Modern presents an exhibition concentrating on his production across different media since 2003. First rising to prominence in the 1990s for his photographs of everyday life and contemporary culture, Tillmans has gone on to work in an ever greater variety of media and has taken an increasingly innovative approach to staging exhibitions. Tate Modern brings this variety to the fore, offering a new focus on his photographs, video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music.
Social and political themes form a rich vein throughout Tillmans’s work. The destabilisation of the world has arisen as a recurring concern for the artist since 2003, an important year when he felt the world changed with the invasion of Iraq and anti-war demonstrations. In 2017, at a moment when the subject of truth and fake news is at the heart of political discourse, Tillmans presents a new configuration of his tabletop installation truth study center 2005-ongoing. This ongoing project uses an assembly of printed matter from pamphlets to newspaper cuttings to his own works on paper to highlight Tillmans’s continued interest in word events and how they are communicated in the media.
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 will particularly highlight the artist’s deeper engagement with abstraction, beginning with the important work Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I 2014. Based on images the artist took of an analogue TV losing signal, this work combines two opposing technologies – the digital and the analogue. Other works such as the series Blushes 2000-ongoing, made without a camera by manipulating the effects of light directly on photographic paper, show how the artist’s work with abstraction continues to push the boundaries and definitions of the photographic form.
The exhibition includes portraiture, landscape and still lives. A nightclub scene might record the joy of a safe social space for people to be themselves, while large-scale images of the sea such as La Palma 2014 or The State We’re In, A 2015 document places where borders intersect and margins are ever shifting. At the same time, intimate portraits like Collum 2011 focus on the delicacy, fragility and beauty of the human body. In 2009, Tillmans began using digital photography and was struck by the expanded opportunities the technology offered him. He began to travel more extensively to capture images of the commonplace and the extraordinary, photographing people and places across the world for the series Neue Welt 2009-2012.
The importance of Tillmans’s interdisciplinary practice is showcased throughout the exhibition. His Playback Room project, first shown at his Berlin exhibition space Between Bridges, provides a space within the museum for visitors to experience popular music by Colourbox at the best possible quality. The video installation Instrument 2015 shows Tillmans dancing to a soundtrack made by manipulating the sound of his own footsteps, while in the Tanks Studio his slide projection Book for Architects 2014 is being shown for the first time in the UK. Featuring thirty-seven countries and five continents, it reveals the tension between architectural form and function. In March, Tillmans will also take over Tate Modern’s south Tank for ten days with a specially-commissioned installation featuring live music events.
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 is co-curated by Chris Dercon and Helen Sainsbury, Head of Programme Realisation, Tate Modern with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing designed by Wolfgang Tillmans and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Press release from Tate Modern
Images from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 with at left, Sunset night drive (2014) and at centre right, Young Man, Jeddah (2012)
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Sunset night drive
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Young Man, Jeddah
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Young Man, Jeddah (B)
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
17 Years Supply
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
“Now the camera is staring into a big cardboard box, half-filled with pharmacist’s tubs and packages, 17 years’ supply of antiretroviral and other medications to treat HIV/AIDS. I imagine the sound that box would make if you shook it, what that sound might say about a human life, its vulnerability and value.”
Adrian Searle. “Wolfgang Tillmans review – a rollercoaster ride around the world,” on The Guardian website Wednesday 15 February 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Market I
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Studio still life, c
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Iguazu
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Oscar Niemeyer
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tube escalator joint
2009
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
JAL
1997
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Port-au-Prince
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
London Olympics
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Fespa Car
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Spectrum Dagger
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Gaza Wall
2009
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Simon, Sebastian Street
2013
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Arms and Legs
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom
Opening hours:
Daily 10.00 – 18.00
Tate Modern website
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