Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg / Truth Study Center / Wolfgang Tillmans

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Driven by playfulness as well as his social consciousness, Tillmans advocates for a visual democracy, declaring: “if one thing matters, everything matters.” A major traveling exhibition of Tillmans’s work, To look without fear, opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in September 2022, and subsequently traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in April 2023. The presentation will go on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in November 2023. As mundane as the above pictures may look to some, to others they are very powerful pieces, a criticism that has persisted throughout all of Tillmans’ work since his early days. For Tillmans, a lot of life is actually remarkable if we (as a society) would just pay attention.

Icestorm (2001). Photograph: Wolfgang Tillmans. Image courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans became known in the 1990s for his photographs of everyday life and contemporary culture and for his pioneering method of displaying prints as whole-room installations. While these elements remain central to his practice, he has expanded his activity since then to include video, publications, sculptural pieces, curatorial projects, performance and recorded music, as well as increasingly experimental approaches to image-making. The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) presented Wolfgang Tillmans: Rebuilding the Future, a major exhibition curated by Tillmans, Rachel Thomas, IMMA’s senior curator, and Sarah Glennie, director of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Although the artist’s work has been included in group shows at IMMA, first in 1997 and most recently in What We Call Love: From Surrealism to Now, which featured his work Central Nervous System (2013) as the exhibition poster, this will be Tillmans’s first individual presentation at the museum and his first solo project in Ireland.

Being diagnosed with the same disease that had taken his partner’s life in such a short time shook Tillmans to his core, and left him with a new outlook on life. I am more into shifting the centre ground. I never wanted to be a so-called gay artist, for instance, even though homosexuality is there in my work, but as an everyday thing. It wasn’t about representing ‘the other’.”

Eurolab respects the intellectual property rights on the contents of the submissions of the participants. You will retain the rights to it, however you agree that they will become part of larger body of work and broader community and not exclusively yours. At any stage you will be given opportunity to ensure you are correctly represented in the larger framework of the project. The brief for this open-call is to send us proposals for communicating the advantages of cooperation and friendship amongst people and nations. Please send drafts, designs, photos, poems, words and short film scripts that can be developed and contribute to a clear yet multi-faceted campaign. Across all media. We need messages, how the Union works and how life would be without it; - how it was without it. And we need ideas how to challenge the organisation itself, how to make it better. Alert us of the failings of the EU. Alert us of the successes of the EU. Also welcome are ideas that are not focused on the EU itself, but on its values, and how they play out amongst people in everyday life in non-political ways. In the run-up to the European elections in May 2019 artists, writers and creatives who feel passionate about the European project come together during the Forum on European Culture in Amsterdam from May 31- June 3. During the 4-day Eurolab, they examine what has gone wrong in the communication of, and about the EU and how to make a new and powerful beginning. Portraiture has been central to Tillmans’s practice for three decades. For him, it is a collaborative act that he has described as ‘a good levelling instrument’. No matter who the sitter – a stranger or someone close to him, a public figure, an unknown individual, or even the artist himself – the process is characterised by the same dynamics: of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self-consciousness. Tillmans sees every portrait as resulting from the expectations and hopes of both sitter and photographer. What does that even mean,” you’re undoubtedly wondering? Well, a simplified version would be this: Wolfgang Tillmans is an openly gay man and has been since his Hamburg years. I promise I only mention that because that experience has given Tillmans and his work a different perspective on the world around him.Adding to the specialness of the moment was that, for most of the intervening two decades, the two subjects remained anonymous. Tillmans had asked around to see if anyone knew these boys, but with no success. The English National Opera’s production of War Requiem featured sets and visual design by Wolfgang Tillmans. There were five evening performances from November 22 through December 7, 2018 at theEnglish National Opera inSt Martin’s Lane, London.

The project first ran at Between Bridges, the non-profit exhibition space Tillmans opened in London in 2006 and has since transferred to Berlin. In three exhibition (‘Colourbox’, ‘American Producers’ ‘Bring Your Own’) that took place between September 2014 and February 2015, he invited visitors to come and listen to music at almost the same quality at which it was originally mastered. In 2003, Wolfgang Tillmans’s first midcareer retrospective, if one thing matters, everything matters, was held at Tate Britain in London. Opening three years after Tillmans was awarded the Turner Prize, this critically acclaimed presentation marked the first time the museum had devoted an exhibition to a single photographer. Among a number of works created specifically for the show was a large-scale video installation, Lights (Body) (2000–2002).

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Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, from 1990 to 1992. Relentlessly pushing to find ways to make new pictures in our image-saturated world, Tillmans has, throughout his career, explored and integrated photography’s many genres, techniques and presentation strategies.