Artists: week 5 two

Wolfgang Tillmans

Color, lidding line, different items and light.

Light, lines and color.

Wolfgang Tillmans was born on 16th August in Remscheid, Germany. He lived and worked in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s before moving to England. He studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art from 1990 to 1992.

Tillmans is mainly known for his use of multiple photographic genres and his unique gallery presentations and his practice has also extended to video.

Since the mid-1980s, Wolfgang Tillmans has reinterpreted representational genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through the medium of photography. He employs a presentational practice that engages the dynamics of space, varying the size of his photographs based on the specific spatial setting of a venue and producing them as large inkjet prints and c-type-prints in multiple sizes. First recognized in the early 1990s for photographs of friends and street subculture he has developed a highly distinctive style of image making that freely embraces a broad range of subjects—from experiences of the everyday, the homo-erotic snapshot, to abstractions that result from experiments with the photographic process.

His exhibition strategies are unique and distinctive, and have changed the way in which photographic images are read and received in the exhibition context. An aspect of his artistic practice is to assume a curatorial role—he creates configurations with his photographs that draw formal, symbolic and ephemeral connections. His installations encourage active audience engagement and ask viewers to consider their own experiences within Tillmans’ visual world.

One of Tillmans' other chief modes of presentation is through the book form, and his numerous collections (see bibliography below) offer both extended studies of specific artistic interests such as in the book Concorde, while other books function in a way similar to his gallery installations and include images from several bodies of work. Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000. He is the first artist working with photography at the center of his practice to have won the Turner Prize and as well the first non-British citizen to have done so.

Since 2006 Wolfgang Tillmans has run a exhibition space below his studio in London called Between Bridges.