Wolfgang Tillmans May 28 – October 1, 2017

Media release

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, [email protected], 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

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.

FONDATION BEYELER

Biography

1968 1987 1995 Born in Remscheid, West Germany. Graduates from Leibniz-Gymnasium, Publishes his first book with Taschen. Remscheid, and moves to Hamburg Meets partner, artist Jochen Klein, in 1978–1982 to begin his civil service, rejecting New York. Devotes all free time to a passion for military service, at the Red Cross and First institutional solo exhibition at astronomy, in particular observing the the Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (Workers’ Kunsthalle Zürich, accompanied by sun and drawing sunspots. Samaritan Federation). an artist book. Is awarded ars viva prize, Germany. 1981 1988 Is awarded Kunstpreis der Böttcher- Joins local green/left-wing youth club First exhibition of photocopy work at strasse in Bremen. of the Lutheran church and visits Café Gnosa, Hamburg. Moves to Berlin for three months before peace-movement festivals in subse- settling back in London in 1996. quent years. 1989 Starts taking photographs for maga- 1996 1982 zines i-D, tango, and Tempo. Jochen Klein moves to London. Meets long-time friends Lutz Hülle and Moves to Berlin to study photography Alexandra Bircken (1983) in school. at Lette-Verein (Lette Association), 1997 and quits after six weeks to move back First institutional exhibition in London 1983 to Hamburg on November 8, one day at Chisenhale Gallery and publication First visit to London. Sees Culture Club before the fall of the Berlin Wall. of the artist book Concorde. in concert. Jochen Klein is diagnosed with AIDS in 1990 June and dies in July. 1984 Meets Maureen Paley in Hamburg. Moves to Cologne for six months in Begins to design and make clothes for Moves to Bournemouth, UK, to study the wake of Klein’s death. himself and friends. photography at Bournemouth and Poole Becomes copublisher of the German Comes out as gay, while Bronski Beat’s College of Art and Design. music magazine Spex. “Smalltown Boy” is in the charts. 1992 1998 1985–1986 Moves to London to live with Alexandra Moves back to London. Takes a studio Seeks out modern and Pop art in Bircken, Lutz Hülle, and Lars Morgen- at 21 Herald Street. museums in the Rhineland as well as roth. Regularly contributes to i-D. Visiting professorship at the Hoch- in New York, Washington, D.C., and Meets Daniel Buchholz in Cologne. schule für bildende Künste, Hamburg Philadelphia while visiting an American (1998–99). pen pal. 1993 Begins to exhibit photographs solely Takes drawing classes and starts to First solo show at Daniel Buchholz and made in the darkroom. Releases body paint. Buchholz & Buchholz, Cologne. Meets of abstract and semiabstract works as Makes music with Bert Leßmann. Isa Genzken. Parkett Edition, 1992–98. First solo show with Maureen Paley at 1986 Interim Art, London. 2000 First visit to the ecumenical Taizé com- Is awarded the Turner Prize, Tate munity in France. 1994 Britain, London, and that same autumn Experiments with digital Canon photo- Moves to New York with first solo show exhibits at Whitechapel Art Gallery and copy machine. at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. the Royal Academy of Arts. FONDATION BEYELER

2001 2007 2014 Moves studio to 223 Cambridge Heath Rents a studio on Prinzessinnenstrasse Visits Saint Petersburg three times as Road. in Berlin as a space to experiment in. artist in Manifesta 10. Meets Conor Donlon, who joins the Joins David Zwirner, New York. studio as main assistant until 2004 2008 Is awarded the Charles Wollaston Award, and is an international exhibitions Karl Kolbitz joins studio as main Royal Academy of Arts, London. assistant until 2008. assistant until 2013. First large-scale museum exhibition Solo exhibition Lighter at Hamburger 2015 tour opens at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Revisits his interest in making music and travels to Turin, Paris, and Copen- Berlin. and performs in video work Instrument. hagen/Humlebæk. Solo exhibition Your Body is Yours opens 2009 at National Museum of Art, Osaka. 2002 Is awarded Kulturpreis der Deutschen Is awarded Hasselblad Foundation Wins competition for the AIDS Memo- Gesellschaft für Photographie, Heidel- International Award in Photography, rial of the City of Munich. berg. Gothenburg. Takes position as Artist Trustee on the 2003–2009 Board of Tate until 2014. 2016 Professorship of interdisciplinary art at Takes part in the 53rd Venice Biennale Devises and designs an anti-Brexit/ Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. curated by Daniel Birnbaum. pro-EU campaign in the run-up to the Begins switching from analogue to EU referendum in the UK. 2003 digital photography and travels exten- Releases two music records 2016 / 1986 Solo exhibition at Tate Britain, London. sively in the following years. EP and Device Control EP as well as Fragile band album That’s Desire / Here 2004 2011 We Are EP. Takes a second home in Berlin. Moves main studio from London to Spends three months in Fire Island Meets partner, artist Anders Clausen, Prinzessinnenstrasse, Berlin. Pines, New York, working on music. First in Berlin. Takes house in Clerkenwell, London. live performance at Union Pool, New York. First of a series of long-term installations at the Panorama Bar in the Berlin 2012–2013 2017 club Berghain. South American museum exhibition Is awarded the B.Z.-Kulturpreis, Berlin. tour goes to São Paulo, Bogotá, Lima, Solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London. 2005 and Santiago de Chile. Explores new medium of a light and Anders Clausen moves to London. sound installation at South Tank, Tate First exhibition of truth study center at 2012 Modern, London. Maureen Paley, London. Neue Welt exhibition at Kunsthalle Redesigns pro-EU/anti-populism cam- Federico Martelli joins studio as an as- Zürich accompanied by his fourth artist paign and expands his political activism. sistant, until 2010, and is international book published with Taschen. exhibitions assistant to present. Retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, which travels to Kunst- 2006–2008 sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen – K21, Solo show at P.S.1, New York; North Düsseldorf, 2013. America survey exhibition tours Is elected full member of the Akademie museums in Chicago, Los Angeles, der Künste, Berlin. Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Opens the nonprofit exhibition space 2013 Between Bridges on Cambridge Heath Is elected full member of the Royal Road, which continues until 2011. Academy of Arts, London. Reopens Between Bridges in Keithstrasse, Berlin, with exhibitions of British artists Patrick Caulfield and Scott King. The Great Survey Wolfgang Tillmans

⁄ 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- Ed. Wolfgang Tillmans for the Fondation Beyeler, 7757-4328-0) 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

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, [email protected]

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.-

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 Partners, foundations and patrons 2016 / 2017

Public Funds

Main Partners

Partners

Foundations and Patrons

BEYELER-STIFTUNG HANSJÖRG WYSS, WYSS FOUNDATION

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF FOUNDATION BEYELER LUMA FOUNDATION ART MENTOR FOUNDATION LUCERNE L. + TH. LA ROCHE STIFTUNG AVC CHARITY FOUNDATION MAX KOHLER STIFTUNG AVINA STIFTUNG SIMONE UND PETER FORCART-STAEHELIN DR. CHRISTOPH M. MÜLLER UND SIBYLLA M. MÜLLER STEVEN A. AND ALEXANDRA M. COHEN FOUNDATION ERNST GÖHNER STIFTUNG TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART FONDATION COROMANDEL THE BROAD ART FOUNDATION FREUNDE DER FONDATION BEYELER WALTER A. BECHTLER-STIFTUNG GEORG UND BERTHA SCHWYZER-WINIKER-STIFTUNG WALTER HAEFNER STIFTUNG HELEN AND CHUCK SCHWAB