Wolfgang Tillmans
WOLFGANG TILLMANS
Details
Revised and expanded edition
An in-depth look at the iconic work of the internationally recognized photographer
Survey by Jan Verwoert, Interview by Peter Halley, Focus by Midori Matsui, Artist's Writings by Wolfgang Tillmans, Update by Johanna Burton
Published by Phaidon
Hardcover, 11 3/8 x 9 7/8 in (290 x 250 mm) , 240 pages
220 illustrations
English Language
Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties – Wolfgang Tillmans created an enigmatic, sexy and highly innovative photography while inventing new icons of beauty and style for gallery goers and magazine readers alike. This book is an updated and expanded edition of his 2002 monograph, featuring a new survey on his work from the past ten years and new artist's writings.
About the AuthorJan Verwoert is a Berlin based art critic and curator. He is a member of the advisory board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been a guest professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2005 he has been a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Verwoert is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly for Afterall, Metropolis M, and Springerin. In 2001 he was awarded the art criticism prize of the German Kunstvereine.
Peter Halley is a New York artist. Exhibiting since the 1980s, Halley has presented surveys of his work at the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (1998), and the Louisiana Art and Science Museum (2005). Halley has also written extensively on art and culture. His writings have been published in Collected Essays 1981–87 (1988), Recent Essays 1990–96 (1997), and Selected Essays 1981-2001 (2013). In 2001 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. From 1996 to 2006 he was the publisher of Index magazine.
Midori Matsui is an art critic, independent curator and scholar who has written extensively on Japanese and Western art and culture. She was a contributing author to Wolfgang Tillmans (Phaidon, 2002), Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001), and Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (Abrams, 2000).
Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Germany, 1968) is an artist and a photographer based in Berlin. The intimate nature of his work is reflected in his writings, which include excerpts from early and most recent interviews and a personal discussion of his video piece, Lights/Body (2002), as well as examples of his many influential artist’s books.
Johanna Burton is Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Formerly Director of the Graduate Program at the center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Burton has curated a number of exhibitions as well as contributing catalogue essays for artists such as Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter and Anish Kapoor.Boston.
Reviews
"The new monograph from Phaidon makes it clear that there is a lot more to Tillmans than his Turner (Prize) show revealed."—Observer magazine
"Excellent."—What's On in London
"As part of Phaidon's new Contemporary Artists series, the book Wolfgang Tillmans aims to dig deeper than the familiar format of career summary and pretty pictures, aiming instead to provide a fuller understanding of his work."—i-D
Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans, (born August 16, 1968, Remscheid, West Germany), German photographer whose images of the everyday span from street photography to portraiture to landscape and still life to abstraction. In 2000 he became the first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize, and he was a recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 2015. Tillmans first experimented with photography in 1987 by enlarging found photographs with a photocopier. He bought his first camera the following year. In the late 1980s he immersed himself in the club scene and gay nightlife in Hamburg and began taking pictures at that time. He submitted those photographs to the British magazine of fashion and contemporary culture i-D, which published them. He continued to publish his work in that magazine into the 21st century. In 1990 he moved to Bournemouth, England, to study art for two years at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. He settled in London in 1992 and the next year exhibited an unframed photograph from his Lutz & Alex series—casual portraits of two decidedly androgynous friends—at Unfair, an art fair in Cologne for emerging artists. As a result of that exhibition, his career took off in Europe. Art book publisher Taschen produced a book of his work in 1993, and Tillmans began exhibiting frequently. He also found success in New York City and exhibited widely while living there in 1994–95 and onward. He continued to rely on i-D and other magazines, however, as a regular venue for his work. In 1997 Tillmans created a now well-known series of seemingly mundane images documenting the last month in the life of his partner, Jochen Klein, who died of AIDS. Following Klein’s death, which had a notable impact on the photographer, Tillmans’s work gained a stronger political angle, and he became a more vocal advocate for the LGBTQ communities. His was the winning design for an AIDS memorial in Munich (installed 2002).
