• Open 365 days a year Monday to Sunday 10 a.m.- 6 p.m, Wednesday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m, FRIDAY BEYELER 10 a.…
Tickets

May 28 – October 1, 2017

This year's big summer exhibition is devoted to the artist Wolfgang Tillmans. It is the first comprehensive engagement with the medium of photography at the Fondation Beyeler, which some time ago added a wonderful group of works by Tillmans to its collection. Around 200 photographic works dating from 1989 to 2017 will be on show from May 28 to October 1, together with a new audiovisual installation.

Tillmans first made a name for himself in the early 1990s through photographs that have attained iconic status for their evocation of the mood of an entire generation, with its carefree urge for freedom and its desire to seize life’s moments. Soon, however, he widened his focus, experimenting with the means of photography to develop a new visual language. He created his images with and without a camera and also using a photocopier. In addition to traditional genres such as portrait, still life and landscape, the exhibition presents abstract works that play with the limits of the visible. It will show how Tillman’s work is concerned with the creation of images rather than with photography in the conventional sense. The exhibition is being designed in close cooperation with the artist.

Room Guide

Show more Show less

Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. At 20 he lived in Hamburg, where he began his work as an artist. In the early 1990s, he studied at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design in Great Britain. Between 1992 and 2007, he lived and worked predominantly in London before shifting his focus to Berlin. His oeuvre has been internationally recognized and exhibited since the early 1990s.

Tillmans first made a name for himself in the early 1990s through photographs that have attained iconic status for their evocation of the mood of an entire generation, with its carefree urge for freedom and its desire to seize life’s moments. Many motifs derive from the techno and gay scene of the 1990s. Over the years, he widened the range of his work, experimenting with the means of photography to develop a new visual language. He created works with and without a camera and also using a photocopier.

In addition to traditional genres such as portrait, still life and landscape, the exhibition presents abstract works that play with the limits of the visible. It shows how Tillman’s work is concerned with the creation of images rather than with photography in the conventional sense. Photography is generally expected to show reality as it is, so what viewers notice in a photograph is primarily its depiction of reality. For Tillmans, this is an inappropriate, narrow approach because a photographic image can show much more. He is interested in a photography that conjures up images and he indefatigably explores the manifold possibilities for creating and experiencing them.

The exhibition consists of around 200 photographic works from the years 1986-2017 as well as a room with relatively new music videos . Tillmans’s works are shown in different formats . Some works are unframed with strips of sticky tape and clippings, while others are framed or displayed in small Plexiglas frames.– The exhibition brings together works spanning 30 years of Wolfgang Tillmans’s artistic career.

Tillmans has been interested in music since his youth. He describes it as being an important form of expression for him. Early in his career, he became aware of music as a connective medium with its own language and the ability to make a strong political statement. The techno scene of the early 1990s left a deep mark on him. During the past three years, Tillmans has been involved in collaborative ventures in the field of music, and he has his own band called Fragile. For the space at the Fondation Beyeler, Tillmans has designed an installation made up of a number of music videos he has created in recent years. 

Wolfgang Tillmans is very active on his Instagram account @wolfgang_tillmans, using it to draw attention to a range of issues, particularly political ones.

oeuvre

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

ADAM, 1991

The portrait is a constant that runs through Tillmans’s oeuvre. Accordingly, the exhibition includes many portraits made in various contexts. Tillmans’s portraits are characterized by the sitters’ great presence, immediacy, and spontaneity. He makes a point of avoiding dramatic staging, such as manipulated lighting, aiming to capture the tension-charged first encounter with the model. Tillmans is interested in the unfamiliar, less obvious aspects of his sitters, rather than the preconceived image or impression they wish to convey. This notion frequently amounts to vulnerability combined with charm and strength tempered by weakness, which is revealed when a person is confronted by the camera. Tillmans has accompanied and regularly photographed his friends for many years. Yet he also captures spontaneous portraits of chance and casual acquaintances. Tillmans has, furthermore, been commissioned to shoot magazine cover spreads and album artwork for a number of celebrities and musicians.

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

NITE QUEEN, 2013

Another genre found in Tillmans’s work is the still life: a symbol of time, transitoriness, and abundance that has been featured in art for centuries. In his still lifes, the artist lets subject, place and time enter a dialogue. For instance, he might begin by arranging flowers, fruit, or mundane objects into an ensemble. Then he leaves this “living still life” to itself for a while—sometimes returning to it after months, or even years, when he feels the moment has come to capture the motif in an image. Thanks to the resulting picture’s dimensions, the lighting conditions, form and color, and flatness or volume of the objects can be precisely inspected. This exploratory gaze and conscious observation can help us to overcome habitual vision and perception.

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

FALTENWURF, SHINY, 2001

In Faltenwurf, shiny, Tillmans confronts us with a composition of two elaborately folded and gathered articles of clothing in different shades of green. The out-of-focus image does not reveal what holds these draped pieces together. For Tillmans, “clothing is per se what we see of people”—the membrane between them and us. The metaphor of a “second skin” presents itself here. After all, we usually encounter each other while clothed. Our body is ever-present, although concealed. Divorced from its wearer, a piece of clothing can be a sculptural object that occupies space, and presents itself to the viewer as a thing of beauty in and of itself.

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

PAPER DROP (REVERSED) II, 2011

Tillmans’s paper drops are both sensuous and graceful. One half of a sheet of photo paper curves back over the other and seemingly dissolves into the brilliant white of the background. The shimmering green surface of the paper shines out of the drop-like shape. The light reflections on the glossy paper, the barely visible shadows, and strong contrasts reduce the depicted object to forms and lines. For the artist, photo paper possesses “its own elegance, when it bends, when you let it hang from your hand, or hold it in both hands.” Folded into a drop shape, the sheet exposes the perfection of things beyond any signs of wear. Thus, Tillmans challenges our eye to perceive a threedimensional object by subtly transforming it into an abstract, two-dimensional shape.

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

GEDSER, 2014

In Gedser, a man immersed in a telephone conversation turns his back on us. The idiosyncrasy of the picture becomes evident only on second look. There is a ghostly white figure passing through the scene, seemingly dissolving into the sky. This image represents a great exception in Tillmans’s oeuvre, in that it was modified on the computer to literally erase a real figure in the background. As the title indicates, the picture was taken on a ferry near the Baltic Sea port of Gedser, Denmark’s most important ferry harbor. “In 2004, I was still aware of how strange it really is to be standing on a ship and phoning without a wire,” the artist recalls. How much attention do we pay to our environment, everyday happenings, and our own actions? Tillmans reminds us of events and places in his own life, focusing on mundane behavior and sharpening our eye for things that have become a matter of course.

 
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; © Wolfgang Tillmans

ANDERS (BRIGHTON ARCIMBOLDO), 2005

“Playfully put warm stones from Brighton beach on my friend’s face. Suddenly they seemed threatening, like growths, or monstrous.” On first sight, this portrait of Tillmans’s friend Anders looks definitely eerie. The face appears in profile with eyes closed while the projecting shoulder rests under the chin. The face is partly covered with roundish stones, which blend into the visage thanks to the picture’s strong black and white contrasts. There are no clues as to where or when the event took place. In addition to Anders’s name and the English resort town of Brighton, the title mentions Arcimboldo—a Mannerist painter who created unusual portraits and figures composed of fruits, vegetables, animals, or books, evoking associative imagery that shifted the border between reality and illusion, and deception and recognition. Tillmans’s photograph entered the Beyeler Collection in 2013, joining the line of compelling portraits by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Andy Warhol, and Thomas Schütte, all of whom categorically shaped this genre in the 20th century.

 
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; © Wolfgang Tillmans

OSTGUT FREISCHWIMMER, LEFT, 2004

The Freischwimmer works were produced in the darkroom without a camera. They form a unique group in Tillmans’s oeuvre. Renouncing the photo negative in favor of gestural operations, and using light as the sole “material” and “subject”, created poetic luminograms during the developing process. The viewer is tempted to associate these images with something real—streaks of paint, windblown sand dunes, hair in the water, sperm, etc.—or at least detect some allusion to reality. Yet rather than a depiction of an object, Tillmans is concerned with illusion. The borderline between real and “made” blurs, thus enriching photography with a painterly dimension.

 
Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

Concorde, 1997

The Concorde prints show a series of similar compositions wherein the aircraft of the same name is shown taking off from or returning to London Heathrow Airport. The plane is captured appearing and disappearing among trees, buildings, and traffic arteries. What started as a tiny speck on a runway, shoots as a dark shape over the horizon, only to elude our perception again a short time later as another tiny speck. Before the Concordes were decomissioned twenty years ago, Tillmans observed them with an astonished gaze and craned neck, looking towards the image from which the earsplitting noise of these supersonic aircraft was completely absent. The pictures on view here are the last seven of 64 featured in the artist’s book dedicated to the Concorde. Due to the depletion of the developing fluid during darkroom work, the images record how the colors gradually shifted towards a purplish fantasy world.

Biography

Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. His work as an artist began when he was aged 20 and living in Hamburg. At the start of the 1990s he studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, England. From 1992 to 2007 he lived mainly in London, before relocating to Berlin. Tillmans’ work has earned recognition and been exhibited around the world since the early 1990s.

Catalogue «Wolfgang Tillmans»

In his creative artistic work, Wolfgang Tillmans (*1968 in Remscheid) revolutionized the medium of photography in an unprecedented way and opened it up towards other media. Beginning in the early nineties, Tillmans documented the people and situations in his immediate surroundings in scenes from London, New York, or Berlin, creating the portrait of a new generation in a style-defining manner. Since the late nineties he has been creating a greater number of cameraless, abstract images that develop from his direct work with and on photographic paper, some of which acquire a sculptural, object-like character. He has also been developing innovative, anti-hierarchical installations of his photographs in space in exhibition contexts. This catalogue is published on the occasion of an extensive exhibition of Tillmans’s oeuvre at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and arranges and groups his works in a fresh way.

305 pages with 383 illustrations
Edition Hardback
Size 24.5 x 30.5 cm

Show more Show less
Winter Grime (2014) Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

#WolfgangTillmansAssignment in cooperation with This ain't art school

#WolfgangTillmansAssignment in cooperation with This ain't art school on the occasion of our «Wolfgang Tillmans» exhibition.

The pictures selected for the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, and their installation in the twelve galleries of the museum, show how Tillmans uses the possibilities of photography to evoke visibility, and to develop a pictorial strategy that invests the perception of the world with a new, human quality. „Seeing per se means thinking about the world, and this actually takes place on different levels at the same time“, says Tillmans. Here is your assignment: Do something that Wolfgang Tillmans is actually doing constantly: Take photos that look at the world through fearless, open eyes and take the playful aspect seriously. Test, look, behold, probe with your eyes, comprehend things and depict what you have identified. Incorporate your feelings about the world. Please post your photos until September 3 using the hashtag #wolfgangtillmansassignment. The three best photos will be chosen by curator Theodora Vischer and by @thisaintartschool. An exhibition catalogue and a goodie bag are waiting for the three winners. 

«Fotografie wie ein grosser Soundtrack»

 Schweiz am Wochenende

«Das Auge ist eine Venusfalle»

NZZ

«Mit Rückgrat und einer Portion Punk»

Tages-Anzeiger und Der Bund

«Fühlen Sie das Sehen!»

Barfi.ch

«Alle Bilder wollen ja erst mal geliebt werden»

Zeit Magazin

«Manche Bilder sind zu laut, denen muss man misstrauen»

Stern

The exhibition «Wolfgang Tillmans» is being supported by: 

 

Beyeler-Stiftung

 

Hansjörg Wyss,
Wyss Foundation

 

LUMA Foundation

 
Foto: Mark Niedermann

 
Foto: Mark Niedermann

 
Foto: Mark Niedermann