Media release

Wolfgang Tillmans

May 28 – October 1, 2017

This year’s big summer exhibition is dedicated 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 considerable group of works by Tillmans to its collection. Around 200 photographic

works dating from 1986 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 portraiture, 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

developed in close cooperation with the artist.

An Artist Talk with Wolfgang Tillmans will take place on September 7, as part of the series organized by

the Fondation Beyeler and UBS.

The Fondation Beyeler will be communicating information and updates on the exhibition on social

media under the hashtags #Tillmans and #FondationBeyeler.

The «Wolfgang Tillmans» exhibition is generously supported by:

Beyeler-Stiftung

Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation

LUMA Foundation

Press images: Please visit our new homepage www.fondationbeyeler.ch and re-register for the press

images download. You can unfortunately no longer use your previous access data.

Further information:

Silke Kellner-Mergenthaler

Head of Communications

Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, presse@fondationbeyeler.ch, www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am–6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm

During Art Basel: June, 10–June 18, 2017, 9 am–7 pm

Media release

Wolfgang Tillmans

May 28 – October 1, 2017

This year’s big summer exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler is dedicated to the German artist Wolfgang

Tillmans (*1968). Around 200 photographic works dating from 1986 to 2017 will be on show from

May 28 to October 1, together with a new audiovisual installation.

Following an invitation from the Fondation Beyeler in 2014, on which occasion the artist installed two

of his own works in a room with paintings and sculptures from the Beyeler Collection, this summer’s

exhibition with Wolfgang Tillmans marks the first comprehensive engagement with the medium of

photography at the Fondation Beyeler. It will show how Tillmans’ work is concerned with the creation

of a new visual language rather than with photography in the conventional sense.

Tillmans’ oeuvre is frequently perceived in connection with his personality. The artist’s involvement

and position in different social contexts yield a narrative that is taken—often all too unquestioningly—

as a key to the understanding of his works. As a consequence, what the pictures by Tillmans really are,

and what makes them unique—something that is less directly tangible, and which remains hard to put

into words—is relegated to the background.

The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler attempts a different approach to the work of Wolfgang

Tillmans. The exhibition is conceived not in terms of a specific theme or a narrative context, but starts

from and revolves around the images themselves. The Fondation Beyeler, with its collection of

outstanding works of classic modernism and contemporary art, represents an ideal context in which to

show how Tillmans has transformed the mechanical medium of photography into a powerfully

expressive, independent visual language. A visual language in which the subject becomes seeing as

such, and thus also the perception of the world.

Tillmans first made a name for himself in the early 1990s with today in part iconic photographs that

captured the mood of a generation and the youth culture of which he was part. He soon widened his

focus, experimenting with the means of photography in a creative, bold and at the same time confident

manner in order to invent new pictorial types—abstract images that are made without a camera lens

and which include the works under the titles Xerox, Silver, Lighter and Freischwimmer/Greifbar.

Tillmans thereby expands and revitalizes not only the traditional genres of portraiture, still life and

landscape, but also exploits the entire spectrum between objectivity and abstraction.

At the same time, Tillmans has developed a specific form of installation. His photographs seldom hang

side by side at the same height, but are dispersed in a loose arrangement across the wall: large and

small, figural and abstract, framed and unframed. It is a kind of presentation in which the visual

relationships between the pictures are just as important as the individual picture. It means, too, that

the individual image is always seen as part of a coherent narrative.

The pictures selected for the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, and their installation in the twelve

galleries of the museum, will 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.

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.

Major exhibitions of his work have been held at Kunsthalle Zürich (1995 and 2012), the

Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2001), Tate Britain, London (2003), Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and Wako

Works of Art, Tokyo (both 2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2006), the Hammer

Museum, Los Angeles (2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2007), the

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporanea, Mexico City (2008), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2008), the

National Museum of Art, Osaka (2015) and Tate Modern, London (2017), among many others. In

2000 Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize. In

2015 he received the International Award in Photography from the Hasselblad Foundation,

Gothenburg.

An Artist Talk with Wolfgang Tillmans will take place on September 7, as part of the series organized

by the Fondation Beyeler and UBS.

The «Wolfgang Tillmans» exhibition is generously supported by:

Beyeler-Stiftung

Hansjörg Wyss, Wyss Foundation

LUMA Foundation

Further information:

Silke Kellner-Mergenthaler

Head of Communications

Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, presse@fondationbeyeler.ch, www.fondationbeyeler.ch

Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen

Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am – 6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm

During Art Basel: June, 10 – June 18, 2017, 9am -7 pm

A Matter of Seeing

Theodora Vischer

1. Introduction

The occasion for these reflections is this summer’s Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Fondation

Beyeler. In 2014, the museum had already invited Tillmans to install two of his own pictures—Ostgut

Freischwimmer, left and Ostgut Freischwimmer, right—in a room with works from the collection. He

selected paintings by Picasso, Max Ernst, Cézanne, and Monet, as well as sculptures by Giacometti and

Arp. The presentation was effective in a wonderful and self-explanatory way. The starting point of our

conversations about this summer’s exhibition was again the site and the specific collection with its

focus on outstanding individual works.The context seemed appropriate for looking at Tillmans’s pictures

with fresh eyes and as individual images.

One seldom encounters the works of Wolfgang Tillmans individually; rather, they are usually presented

in small groups. Most typically, his work is experienced in the overall context of his exhibitions.

Tillmans has—since his first show at the gallery of Daniel Buchholz in Cologne in 1993—developed a

specific exhibition practice and style of presentation that influence the significance and effect of the

individual picture. The installation of the works does not correspond to a chronological arrangement.

The photographs do not all hang at the same height next to one another, but seem to be installed in a

loose configuration on a wall: large and small, figurative and abstract, unframed and framed. In place

of the criteria that are usually used in hanging pictures, Tillmans has developed in his exhibition

practice an order of visual connections between the pictures, of variety, ambivalence, and openness—

altogether characteristics that inform his work. The individual photographic images immediately

become part of a coherent narrative that tends to stand in the foreground in this type of presentation.

Moreover, Tillmans’s exhibitions are hardly ever dedicated to only one aspect of his work; they get their

character through the selection of the pictures and through the “choreographic” emphasis of particular

aspects.

This explains Tillmans’s interest in seeing his photographs anew and as individual images in the

exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler. In addition, the exhibition also offers an opportunity to ask what is

characteristic or specific regarding his pictures, what—in view of their enormous variety— they have in

common, or whether anything at all connects them. The following reflections address these questions.

The spectrum of photographic pictures that has evolved since the late 1980s is broad with respect to

content, as well as formally and technically. Large-format pictures stand beside small formats, classical

genres beside subjects not seen before, and abstract pictures beside representational ones. The

stupendous variety of this imagery eludes a clear positioning within the pictorial tradition of

photography—not to mention that of painting—allowing instead now one, now another aspect of

Tillmans’s work to move to the foreground. But, if neither photography nor painting suffices as a frame

of reference, where should one begin?

Pictures have always attempted to comprehend and depict the world—the visible, the not visible, or the

invisible—speculatively or philosophically, falsely or correctly, by concealing or by revealing. It is no

different in art than in science or in everyday life. The interest in and the possibilities of portraying the

world with pictures have, since the end of the twentieth century—that is, in a very short time—greatly

increased. The limits of what is visible, or rather, what can be captured and shown with images, have

since been extended many times over. Thanks to technological developments, in particular

digitalization, the making of images in science and research has become an essential instrument of

knowledge and has found its way—through its utilization in, for example, the military, astronomy, and

medicine—into public awareness and quotidian life.

It may at first seem banal to point out this context when speaking of an artist of this generation who

has now and again described himself as a picture maker, and yet it is instructive to keep it in mind as

an extended frame of reference when considering what makes his pictures specific.

2. Step by Step

Tillmans, born in 1968, knew very early on that he wanted to be an artist and also that his medium was

the picture—but without knowing more than that. And so, he initially began to draw and paint. Then he

had an experience that he later brought up again and again, understanding it as a pivotal moment with

regard to his further creative work. He went to a copy shop in his hometown of Remscheid to make

some photocopies. The photocopier was a black-and-white one, a recent model with which one could

make enlargements of up to four hundred percent. On one of these enlargements, Tillmans suddenly

discovered things that he had not seen before: the texture of the paper, shadings, and indefinable

shadows, which charged the image and gave it a completely different reality. “I realized how much

more meaningful those photocopies were in texture and in presence than the drawings and paintings I

was making at the time—that this mechanically produced object had a richer texture because of the

rather rough dot screen and the surface lines generated by the technology of the moment.”¹ The first

pictures that Tillmans perceived as specifically his own developed from working with the photocopier;

and this was what paved the way to the camera, with which Tillmans soon began to work. Xerox, the

name the artist gave to these early pictures originating from photocopies, became an important type of

image, even in his later work. The fascination of discovering and making visible something unexpected

in what is seemingly open and visible became, for Tillmans, a key impulse in his making of pictures.

One could go back farther and tell the story of the fourteen-year-old boy who spent hours in the attic

observing the night sky through a telescope and trying to capture what he saw with a camera held to its

lens.² It would be a childhood anecdote if it were not for the fact that in his later work the observation

of astronomical occurrences and phenomena (such as, for example, the passage of the Hale-Bopp

comet in April 1, 1997; the solar eclipse in 1998; or the transit of Venus in 2004) became a recurring

type of image.

2.1

But let us go back to the beginning and take things one at a time.The photographic work of Wolfgang

Tillmans, as we know it, began in 1988/89 when he lived first in Hamburg to absolve his civil service,

then moved to Bournemouth, and, in 1992, started living in London. The catalyst was the music scene,

which, with the emergence of acid house in Europe around 1988, became a defining experience for a

whole generation. Tillmans was a part of this scene, and he wanted to hold on to the energy, the feeling

of community and freedom, moments of happiness. It was the first time he consciously used the

camera as an artistic medium.3 The result was pictures of dancing people, portraits of friends and

musicians, pictures of love and sexuality—pictures that the people captured by the camera instantly

perceived as their own. They made Tillmans famous almost overnight. And at the same time there were

also the still life-like pictures: abandoned party rooms, a windowsill with a couple of objects on it, a

pair of jeans draped over a stair post. The jeans were a predecessor of the later Faltenwurf pictures,

which show articles of clothing as fragments in close-ups. Closeness and distance are manifested

simultaneously in the pictures of this period. The closeness of him who is part of these images, and the

distance of his detached gaze: looking meticulously, observing, registering, paying the same attention

to peripheral parts as to the obvious ones. Precisely this duplexity of closeness and distance is

guarantor for Tillmans’s specific gaze. Never voyeuristic, never fawning, but attentive, open,

affectionate, and curious.

2.2

Tillmans’s imagery began to change towards the end of the 1990s, at first imperceptibly and

unnoticed, then clearly and conspicuously. In the meantime, he was technically able to develop his own

color prints. This meant that it was now possible to keep mistakes and ambiguities that had occurred

during the developing process and to examine the prints for their suitability as pictures. In an external

laboratory, of course, they would have been cleaned up or treated as defective work. What turned up

unexpectedly opened the eye to the picture’s own reality, which Tillmans integrated into the depiction

of the photographic image. Between 1998 and 2003 he created a series of works using this process.

The first ones were the Parkett Edition,4 sixty color prints that Tillmans had set aside between 1992

and 1998 as failed but, nevertheless, somehow interesting, and that now, thanks to their

deviations, appeared in a new light.

Even more striking than these images was the appearance around the same time of abstract pictures

that seemed to have no connection to Tillmans’s earlier photographs, but that are characterized by a

similarly strong and immediate pictorial presence. It started with Blushes, then came Mental Pictures,

which created a new type of image made without the camera lens. These are made without using a

camera and without negatives—only with the use of light and chemicals. Later, the Freischwimmer,

Silver, and Lighter works joined them. The Freischwimmer are, one could say, light pictures in the

elementary sense, “drawn” in the darkroom on photographic paper through controlled manipulation

with different light sources.The Silver series, on the other hand, are the result of a largely mechanical

process, divested of control, in which an undeveloped piece of photographic paper—exposed or

unexposed—is fed through a printer that Tillmans has either not cleaned properly or not cleaned at all,

so that traces of chemicals cause reactions on the paper. The works of the Lighter series address the

three-dimensionality of the photo prints. They refer to the sculptural, physical character of the sheet of

paper, an extended object in space as well as a carrier of illusion and meaning.

The Silver, Freischwimmer, and Lighter works, in their differing concentration on their own materiality,

develop an indecipherable attraction and beauty. Tillmans’s specific way of seeing, expressed in his

photographic images from the 1990s, is marked by commitment and curiosity towards the visible

world. In his artistic engagement with

the condition of the medium, the gaze becomes sharpened and opens up to an abstract pictorial reality

that one is not otherwise aware of and that is not further defined. It is perhaps characteristic that one

of the few works in this context whose title makes a concrete reference to the outside world is Memorial

for the Victims of Organized Religions, a forty-eight-part Silver work from 2006.

Around this time Tillmans again took up the Xerox works that he had presented in 1988 in his very first

shows at Café Gnosa in Hamburg and the Remscheid public library. The Xerox series—no longer only in

the small DIN A3 format of the earlier works, but, from 2005 on, in large-format, framed laser prints—

gained a new importance that fits seamlessly into the imagery of the Freischwimmer and Silver works.

Tillmans made this clear for the first time in his exhibition at P.S.1 in 2006, in which most of the large

formats were Xerox, Silver, or Freischwimmer pictures, along with a few figurative photographic

pictures, which showed another kind of abstraction in the extreme sharpening of the selected picture

detail.5

*

Tillmans, in his intensive engagement with the abstract image, has not left his previous camera work

behind but has continued to develop it. This is interesting and by no means self-evident, because with

this concurrence of types of images his work has become increasingly multifaceted and complex. Even

though Tillmans’s artistic interest in the first years of the twenty-first century was focused primarily on

abstract pictures made without a camera, he continues to create portraits, still lifes, Faltenwürfe, and

other figurative works. New motifs have been added, as autonomous pictures as well as in series, in

which the relationship between abstraction and figuration, between two- and three-dimensionality of

the support is to some extent apparent.

A prominent example is the series of paper drop pictures from 2001 on. These are photographs of a

sheet of photographic paper curling back on itself to form the shape of a drop with only the edges of

the sheet in focus, which leads to luminous abstractions. In one of the texts in which he reflects on the

pictorial inventions of that decade, Tillmans sketches a conceptual evolution from the Faltenwurf to the

paper drop pictures, and then from them to the Lighter works, an unexpected perspective that is

nonetheless coherent and convincing.6 It refers to the fact that in Tillmans’s imagery the border

between figuration and abstraction is not clearly drawn, but rather they are porous, with both sides

referencing each other.

Tillmans’s abstract pictures are often contrasted with his figurative and representational photographs.

Abstract art in the modern period— initiated by Kandinsky, Mondrian, and the Cubists—was, however,

a different thing. For them it was about, on the one hand, a reduction of the visible world to its

underlying order; and, on the other hand, a turning away from the real world in search of a spiritual or

utopian reality. This is not true of Tillmans, and therefore an art-historically tinged differentiation is not

applicable. More appropriately, one could say that the field of figurative art, which always implies

recognition as well, is vastly expanded and opened up, and, hence, types of pictures and genres in

which at first nothing or nothing familiar can be seen also belong to it. This categorial

reinterpretation—from differentiation to expansion—cannot be stressed enough. It is the source of the

outstanding achievement and innovative quality of Tillmans’s artistic approach.

2.3

In 2009 Tillmans traveled to see the total solar eclipse in Shanghai; in his luggage was his old

analogue camera and a new digital camera bought for the trip. After years of working in the familiar

surroundings of his studio, the trip amounted to a return to the outside world.7It was Tillmans’s first

trip to China and a good opportunity to work with the new camera technique in unknown surroundings.

That trip was followed by other trips to continents and countries he had never visited before. In those

few years he took pictures that open up a world to the viewer that is new in every respect. The pictures

show themes that betray the eyes of the traveler who has little time but is all the more eager to see and

record as much as possible. Street life, houses, groups of people, advertisements, cars, airport

corridors, starry nights, and pictures taken from the airplane window.

Not only what can be seen is new, but, more importantly, also how it is shown. The pictures are of an

unprecedented sharpness and brilliance, the colors glow, and unremarkable details become part of the

whole picture. Everything seems intensified. Closeness and distance merge into one another and

connect on the surface. This can be understood in an exemplary and particularly impressive way in the

spreads in FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA, published in 2012.8 In this book, Tillmans combines

two international trade fairs: a fair for digital print technologies in Barcelona, and one for the fruit trade

in Berlin. The surface is celebrated in these pictures; each detail is pulled out of the darkness.

One year later Tillmans presented for the first time the photographs of the previous three years in large-

format inkjet prints in the exhibition Neue Welt at the Kunsthalle Zürich.9 As if to lend weight to the

specific quality of the pictures, the artist departed from his usual approach and hung the pictures side

by side. They were hung at the same height and were of a similar format. The result was that each

picture presented itself as an individual work. Yet they were hung so close together that one’s eye did

not lose itself in the single picture, but rather the overall context always remained present.

Tillmans described switching to a digital camera as learning a new pictorial language. “It was a shift in

thinking and seeing. [...] With the new camera I found myself with a tool in my hands that technically

sees—literally shows—more than what my eye sees.”10

For Tillmans, a central impulse in making pictures has always been making visible what is unseen in

the obvious. Since 1989 his work with and without a camera has been dedicated to this objective. With

the digital camera, Tillmans suddenly had an instrument at his disposal that could easily do exactly

that and even more. For it is able to recognize and record what the eye has not registered and the mind

has not yet processed. This is not possible with an analogue camera. It was not until 2011 that

Tillmans had made the new technology his own and laid aside the analogue camera.

*

As with earlier developments, the transition from the analogue to the digital camera meant neither a

break in Tillmans’s work nor a suspension of what he had been doing before. At the same time as he

was acquiring the digital camera technique and working on the pictures of Neue Welt, which developed

into an extensive genre, he continued to pursue previous types and genres of pictures and to

recontextualize them using new motifs. In the new Faltenwürfe and still lifes, the portraits and nudes,

and the cloudscapes and seascapes, the changed gaze with the new camera is undeniably effective.

The continuity of a genre through the decades, as well as the shift in the gaze as a consequence

thereof, is visible in the essayistic synopsis of individual groups of motifs and types of pictures in this

catalogue.

Two inkjet prints from the same year serve as examples of what the changed gaze achieves. morning

rain from 2014 shows three lemons nestled in the leaves of a tree from which they hang, yet they are

shot so close up that the picture resembles a still life. There is an almost impertinent luxuriance and

magical beauty: the yellow fruits are plump, the green of the leaves tells of saturating rainwater, the

dark places are full of allure. And then Weak Signal, from the same year. Nothing can be seen but the

electromagnetic static of an analogue television screen, on which the barely discernible image,

perceived as a dark shadow, of a weak signal emerges. It is the complete opposite of morning rain, and

yet—it is exactly the same. For just as a picture like morning rain only becomes possible with a digital

camera, it is also only with digital technology that an image of a monitor can be captured without black

lines. Although from a distance it seems to be a black-and-white image, up close it unexpectedly turns

out to be intensely colorful.

“It’s all a matter of the gaze, of an open, anxiety-free gaze.”11

The chronological consideration of the work of Tillmans is instructive and helps us to understand what

is special about his pictures and what connects them. It shows us how consistently he uses the

technical possibilities of photography and the creation of images so as to see more and make more

visible, and to develop a pictorial strategy that is able to put a face on the complexity and ambivalence

of the world. The consideration, coming primarily from a perspective immanent to art, makes clear that

formal and content-related interests are strongly entwined and reference each other. Viewed in this

light, one can say that Tillmans’s artistic process can always also be understood as a metaphor for his

attitude towards the world and the human beings in it.

Footnotes:

1 Michelle Kuo, “Step into Liquid: Michelle Kuo Talks with Wolfgang Tillmans about the Ascendancy of

Ink-Jet Printing,” Artforum (September 2012), p. 423.

2 See “New World/Life is astronomical: Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation with Beatrix

Ruf,” in Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt, ed. Wolfgang Tillmans, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zürich (Cologne,

2012), unpaginated.

3 Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation with Jon Savage, Arena Homme+: The Legendary

Men’s Magazine 44 (Winter 2015 / Spring 2016), pp. 318–20.

4 Special edition for the art journal Parkett 53 (1998), ills. pp. 138–40.

5 Wolfgang Tillmans, Freedom From The Known, exh. cat. P.S.1 Contemporary Art

Center, New York (Göttingen, 2006).

6 See Wolfgang Tillmans, “Paper Drop/Lighter,” in Wolfgang Tillmans, ed. Jan Verwoert, Peter Halley,

Midori Matsui, Johanna Burton, 2nd revised and expanded edition (London, 2014), p. 154.

7 Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt 2012 (see note 2), unpaginated.

8 Wolfgang Tillmans, FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA (Cologne, 2012).

9 Kunsthalle Zürich, September 1–November 4, 2012.

10 Wolfgang Tillmans, “Shifts and Turns,” in Jan Verwoert et al., eds., 2014 (see note 6), p. 151.

11 Wolfgang Tillmans: Neue Welt 2012 (see note 2), unpaginated.

Biography

1968 Born in Remscheid, West Germany. 1978–1982 Devotes all free time to a passion for astronomy, in particular observing the sun and drawing sunspots.

1981 Joins local green/left-wing youth club of the Lutheran church and visits peace-movement festivals in subse-quent years.

1982 Meets long-time friends Lutz Hülle and Alexandra Bircken (1983) in school.

1983 First visit to London. Sees Culture Club in concert.

1984 Begins to design and make clothes for himself and friends. Comes out as gay, while Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” is in the charts.

1985–1986 Seeks out modern and Pop art in museums in the Rhineland as well as in New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia while visiting an American pen pal. Takes drawing classes and starts to paint. Makes music with Bert Leßmann.

1986 First visit to the ecumenical Taizé com-munity in France. Experiments with digital Canon photo-copy machine.

1987 Graduates from Leibniz-Gymnasium, Remscheid, and moves to Hamburg to begin his civil service, rejecting military service, at the Red Cross and the Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (Workers’ Samaritan Federation).

1988 First exhibition of photocopy work at Café Gnosa, Hamburg.

1989 Starts taking photographs for maga-zines i-D, tango, and Tempo. Moves to Berlin to study photography at Lette-Verein (Lette Association), and quits after six weeks to move back to Hamburg on November 8, one day before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1990 Meets Maureen Paley in Hamburg. Moves to Bournemouth, UK, to study photography at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design.

1992 Moves to London to live with Alexandra Bircken, Lutz Hülle, and Lars Morgen-roth. Regularly contributes to i-D. Meets Daniel Buchholz in Cologne.

1993 First solo show at Daniel Buchholz and Buchholz & Buchholz, Cologne. Meets Isa Genzken.First solo show with Maureen Paley at Interim Art, London.

1994 Moves to New York with first solo show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

1995 Publishes his first book with Taschen. Meets partner, artist Jochen Klein, in New York. First institutional solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, accompanied by an artist book. Is awarded ars viva prize, Germany. Is awarded Kunstpreis der Böttcher-strasse in Bremen. Moves to Berlin for three months before settling back in London in 1996.

1996 Jochen Klein moves to London.

1997 First institutional exhibition in London at Chisenhale Gallery and publication of the artist book Concorde. Jochen Klein is diagnosed with AIDS in June and dies in July. Moves to Cologne for six months in the wake of Klein’s death. Becomes copublisher of the German music magazine Spex.

1998 Moves back to London. Takes a studio at 21 Herald Street. Visiting professorship at the Hoch-schule für bildende Künste, Hamburg (1998–99). Begins to exhibit photographs solely made in the darkroom. Releases body of abstract and semiabstract works as Parkett Edition, 1992–98.

2000 Is awarded the Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London, and that same autumn exhibits at Whitechapel Art Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts.

FONDATION BEYELER

2001 Moves studio to 223 Cambridge Heath Road. Meets Conor Donlon, who joins the studio as main assistant until 2004 and is an international exhibitions assistant until 2008. First large-scale museum exhibition tour opens at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and travels to Turin, Paris, and Copen-hagen/Humlebæk.

2002 Wins competition for the AIDS Memo-rial of the City of Munich.

2003–2009 Professorship of interdisciplinary art at Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main.

2003 Solo exhibition at Tate Britain, London.

2004 Takes a second home in Berlin. Meets partner, artist Anders Clausen, in Berlin. First of a series of long-term installa-tions at the Panorama Bar in the Berlin club Berghain.

2005 Anders Clausen moves to London. First exhibition of truth study center at Maureen Paley, London. Federico Martelli joins studio as an as-sistant, until 2010, and is international exhibitions assistant to present.

2006–2008 Solo show at P.S.1, New York; North America survey exhibition tours museums in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Opens the nonprofit exhibition space Between Bridges on Cambridge Heath Road, which continues until 2011.

2007 Rents a studio on Prinzessinnenstrasse in Berlin as a space to experiment in.

2008 Karl Kolbitz joins studio as main assistant until 2013. Solo exhibition Lighter at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.

2009 Is awarded Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie, Heidel-berg. Takes position as Artist Trustee on the Board of Tate until 2014. Takes part in the 53rd Venice Biennale curated by Daniel Birnbaum. Begins switching from analogue to digital photography and travels exten-sively in the following years.

2011 Moves main studio from London to Prinzessinnenstrasse, Berlin. Takes house in Clerkenwell, London.

2012–2013 South American museum exhibition tour goes to São Paulo, Bogotá, Lima, and Santiago de Chile.

2012 Neue Welt exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich accompanied by his fourth artist book published with Taschen. Retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which travels to Kunst-sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen – K21, Düsseldorf, 2013. Is elected full member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

2013 Is elected full member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Reopens Between Bridges in Keithstrasse, Berlin, with exhibitions of British artists Patrick Caulfield and Scott King.

2014 Visits Saint Petersburg three times as artist in Manifesta 10. Joins David Zwirner, New York. Is awarded the Charles Wollaston Award, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

2015 Revisits his interest in making music and performs in video work Instrument. Solo exhibition Your Body is Yours opens at National Museum of Art, Osaka. Is awarded Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, Gothenburg.

2016 Devises and designs an anti-Brexit/pro-EU campaign in the run-up to the EU referendum in the UK. Releases two music records 2016 / 1986 EP and Device Control EP as well as Fragile band album That’s Desire / Here We Are EP. Spends three months in Fire Island Pines, New York, working on music. First live performance at Union Pool, New York.

2017 Is awarded the B.Z.-Kulturpreis, Berlin. Solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London. Explores new medium of a light and sound installation at South Tank, Tate Modern, London. Redesigns pro-EU/anti-populism cam-paign and expands his political activism.

FONDATION BEYELER

The Great Survey

Wolfgang Tillmans

Ed. Wolfgang Tillmans for the Fondation Beyeler,

Riehen/Basel, texts by Wolfgang Tillmans, Theodora

Vischer u. a., graphic design by Paul Hutchinson,

Wolfgang Tillmans

English

2017. 304 pp., 383 ills.

clothbound

24.50 x 30.50 cm

ISBN 978-3-7757-4329-7

62,50 CHF

⁄ A life for pictures

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. (German edition ISBN 978-3-

7757-4328-0)

Events connected with the “Wolfgang Tillmans” exhibition May 28 – October 1, 2017 Long Wednesday: Art. Meeting Point. Bar June 28 / July 26 / August 30 / September 27 from 6 to 8 pm On the last Wednesday evening of each month, visitors can exchange views with young experts who have concerned themselves intensively with selected works by Wolfgang Tillmans and who are happy to engage in short, stimulating discussions. With a DJ and bar This event is included in the price of admission to the museum. Sommerfest Saturday, August 12, 10 am to 10 pm Free concert in the Berower Park with the celebrated band Kadebostany as well as short guided tours and workshops in the “Wolfgang Tillmans” exhibition for families, children and young people. A number of stands will serve food and beverages. In cooperation with KULTURBÜRO RIEHEN and supported by the IWB. Price: CHF 10 including admission to the museum. Artist’s Talk: Wolfgang Tillmans Organized by the Fondation Beyeler and UBS Thursday, September 7, 6:30 pm On the occasion of his exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans will talk about his works. The number of places is limited. The event is included in the price of admission to the museum. Open Studio Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from July 7 to August 13, from 2 to 6 pm The Fondation Beyeler is opening its studios during the summer holidays. From Friday to Sunday, they will be open to anyone who enjoys art and creativity. There will be a wide range of photographic experiments inspired by the “Wolfgang Tillmans” exhibition. The studios are open to everyone, but children up to the age of 12 must be accompanied by an adult. Participation is free of charge. Advance registration is not required. Public guided tour in English Sundays, 3–4 pm 25 June 23 July 20 August 17 September Guided tour of the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition Price: Admission fee + CHF 7.-

Art Education Public tours and events For our daily program see www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/whats-on/calendar Private tours for groups Information and booking: Tel. +41 (0)61 645 97 20, fuehrungen@fondationbeyeler.ch Schools Information and booking at www.fondationbeyeler.ch/en/art-mediation/schools Online-Ticketing for museum entry and events at www.fondationbeyeler.ch Or advance-booking directly at the museum ticket office

Service Museum opening times: 10 am–6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm During Art Basel: June, 10–June 18, 2017, 9 am–7 pm Admission charges: Adults CHF 25.- Up to age 25 (show ID at the ticket office) and Art Club members free admission Students up to age 30 CHF 12.- Groups of at least 20 people (by prior appointment only) and disabled visitors with ID CHF 20.- Further information: Silke Kellner-Mergenthaler Head of Communications Tel. + 41 (0)61 645 97 21, presse@fondationbeyeler.ch, www.fondationbeyeler.ch Fondation Beyeler, Beyeler Museum AG, Baselstrasse 77, CH-4125 Riehen Fondation Beyeler opening hours: 10 am–6 pm daily, Wednesdays until 8 pm During Art Basel: June, 10–June 18, 2017, 9 am–7 pm

Public Funds

Main Partners

Foundations and Patrons

Partners, foundations and patrons 2016 / 2017

Partners

BEYELER-STIFTUNGHANSJÖRG WYSS, WYSS FOUNDATION

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF FOUNDATION BEYELERART MENTOR FOUNDATION LUCERNEAVC CHARITY FOUNDATIONAVINA STIFTUNGDR. CHRISTOPH M. MÜLLER UND SIBYLLA M. MÜLLER ERNST GÖHNER STIFTUNGFONDATION COROMANDELFREUNDE DER FONDATION BEYELERGEORG UND BERTHA SCHWYZER-WINIKER-STIFTUNGHELEN AND CHUCK SCHWAB

LUMA FOUNDATIONL. + TH. LA ROCHE STIFTUNGMAX KOHLER STIFTUNGSIMONE UND PETER FORCART-STAEHELINSTEVEN A. AND ALEXANDRA M. COHEN FOUNDATIONTERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ARTTHE BROAD ART FOUNDATIONWALTER A. BECHTLER-STIFTUNGWALTER HAEFNER STIFTUNG