today’s inspiration_Nothing could have prepared us_Everything could have prepared us_Wolfgang Tillmans_Centre Pompidou_Paris_France
Wolfgang Tillmans unfolds his work in the vacant premise of the Bibliothèque publique d’information, where the iconic architecture of the Centre Pompidou resonates with the artist’s work on the presence and history of knowledge-making, shaping an original visual and discursive experience.
The exhibition spans nearly forty years of artistic creation and covers the entire spectrum of Tillmans’s practice. It shows a cross-section of his photographic oeuvre, whose order and display emerge in response to the architecture rather than from a sense of chronology. In parallel, Tillmans incorporates videos, music and sound as well as his personal objects. He also experiments with the infrastructure of the library to highlight the analogies between artistic work and this specific repository of knowledge and social diversity. More than ever, the artist intervenes in the space – a hallmark of his exhibitions since the mid-1990s – and with it transforms existing structure and invents new forms of display. By that, he has developed an all-encompassing installation and reinvented the way photography is exhibited.
On the threshold between the analogue and digital ears, Wolfgang Tillmans (born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968) has consistently shifted the boundaries of the visible – capturing the sometime beautiful, sometimes unsettling fragility of the physical world while also creating pictures without a camera, celebration the purity (and impurity) of photosensitive material on the vessel of obsolescence. In this way, he has shaped his own unmistakable aesthetic universe, which emerged from his early astronomical observations and the spirit of the subcultures of the early 1990s. This exploration, deeply rooted in his time, has fueled his search for timely forms of humanism and coexistence, a quest that has had a lasting influence beyond contemporary art.
At the same time, his work is rooted in the “here and now”, making pictures of the present as fragments of lived-in history. He addresses the cohesion of the European Union and democratic societies, examines the dogmas of political ideologies, traces the effects of globalization and explores the distribution channels of knowledge and information. By brining together early works from his archive with most recent works for this exhibition, he echoes the dialectic that has characterized the world since 1989 : social progress and freedoms that were hard-won and that seemed secure are once again put into question.
Tillmans’s site-specific contemporary art installation reflects the complexity at play in our perception of time, but also of reality and what we see and how we shape it.
In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been the subject of major retrospectives in leading institutions, notably at Tate Modern in London in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He has also presented a major exhibition entitled ‘Fragile’ which toured the African continent (2018–2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoundé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is his first solo exhibition at an institution in Paris since his ambitious installation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2002.
https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/nSlcbMZ
JLS 