Wolfgang Tillmans
Photography’s tangible light and sensual witness.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “To look without fear,” 2023
installation view at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (courtesy AGO, photo by Wolfgang Tillmans)
German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ first retrospective in Canada, To look without fear, is massive, with some 300 works by the international star spread through 10 rooms at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The show, which debuted last year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, illustrates the sprawl of the Turner Prize winner’s generous gaze since the 1980s, reaching across various contexts, including clubs and celebrities at the intersection of music, literature, art and fashion.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “August self portrait,” 2005 (© Wolfgang Tillmans; courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London)
Visitors may recognize The Cock (kiss), a photograph of two men kissing, which was used on the British cover of Douglas Stuart’s 2022 novel Young Mungo. Music lovers may gravitate towards portraits of brooding Irish-born musician Richard D. James, best known as Aphex Twin, or a sparkling portrait of Smokin’ Jo, British DJ Joanne Joseph. Other highlights include simmering ragga dancers, Kingston and a neat shot of the legendary Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer, resting on grass.
The show, which continues to Oct. 1, was installed in Toronto by Tillmans himself, with works grouped in floor-to-ceiling arrangements, often simply taped to the wall or hung with clips. A 320-page catalogue, Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader, published by MoMA, accompanies the show.
Tillmans, in a 2001 interview for Art on Paper with poet and art writer Nathan Kernan, said his art has been seen in terms of its social and pop-culture content because “that is the most tangible aspect of it.” To look without fear certainly can be defined through this lens, but its quieter images extend to his engagement with the photograph as an object in itself.
Wolfgang Tillmans, “Venus transit,” 2004 (©Wolfgang Tillmans; courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London)
Venus transit, pinned to the wall with binder clips, makes visible the processes and layered influences that inform his work. A large inkjet print, it depicts the transit of Venus across the sun, significant in astronomy because it allowed 18th-century scientists to estimate the size of the solar system. The concept of photographic scale becomes intimate under Tillman’s gaze. He tells Kernan that astronomy initiated him into the visual world: “When I was ten or eleven, in 1978 or 1979, I fell in love with the stars, and the sun during the day, observing and drawing the sunspots. I was obsessed with astronomy, and the eclipses were a particular delight.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, “To look without fear,” 2023
installation view at Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (courtesy AGO, photo by Wolfgang Tillmans)
Tillmans’ capaciousness also surfaces in Truth Study Center, which uses tabletops to present magazine clippings, news printouts and other ephemera that interrogate geopolitics and constructions of truth. The 55-year-old artist, who has been developing the project for nearly two decades, added several items responding to Canadian contexts for this iteration of the show. One printout reads: “24 years ago, in 1999, Nunavut was founded. 1999 was 24 years away from 1975.” Through such facts of scale and time, Tillmans draws attention to the problematic historicization that museums enact, while also challenging such authority through his orientation toward process and by presenting works that are still in progress.
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Wolfgang Tillmans, “Freischwimmer 54,” 2004 (©Wolfgang Tillmans; courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London)
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Wolfgang Tillmans, “Icestorm,” 2001 (©Wolfgang Tillmans; courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London)
Tillmans’ process is highly technical in photographs such as Icestorm, made using experimental darkroom techniques. Similarly, Freischwimmer 54 was likely created in the manner of Freischwimmer 120, by manipulating light in the darkroom without negative or camera.
While Icestorm marks his versatility as a photographer and is the lead image for the exhibition’s promotional material, other works also overflow with the tangibility of light. I encountered my favourite image after turning a corner into the tenth room, where a massive photograph of a woman’s face confronted me. Her eyes are closed, and a man’s hands are in her hair. I choked up with recognition: “That’s love.”
Tillmans told Kernan: “Maybe one thing that holds the work together, the abstract and the figurative, is that it all deals with the phenomenon of light, and reflects my fascination with making something that is untouchable tangible.” The 1989 photograph, Love (hands in hair), is like light.
It feels wrong to define a throughline or to summarize Tillmans’ work in terms of themes. Historically, photography has been linked to representation, marking a distance between art and life, or image and reality. Tillmans’ photographs are different. To look without fear is to partake in life as a sensual witness. ■
Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from April 7 to Oct. 1, 2023. Developed by Roxana Marcoci, acting chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and organized at the AGO by photography curator Sophie Hackett.
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