Overview

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans's portraiture and still lifes, Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment. Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world. Published on the occasion of Tillmans's exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong in 2018, this fully bilingual catalogue juxtaposes pictures of intimacy and friendship with views and angles of the world at large. An aerial view of the Sahara desert displays almost infinite detail while being monochromatic and near-abstract in appearance. In line with Tillmans's interest in exhibitions as amplifiers of a particular, underlying perspective, each of the works engages in an intricate system of relationships between its aesthetic elements, subject, and institutional setting. Seen together, they implicate the viewer as an active part of the dialogue. The 2016 interview with author Allie Biswas of The Brooklyn Rail has been edited and expanded by the artist for this catalogue.

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9781941701942

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Reviews

Tillmans's art has explored the fragility of the political consensus.--Emily Witt The New Yorker

Whether he's photographing Kate Moss or an impeccably wrapped Japanese peach, Tillmans approaches all his subjects in exactly the same way. Then there's the way Tillmans presents his photographs. In galleries and museums, he likes to exhibit his images unframed, either taped to the wall or pinned with bulldog clips in much the same way Polaroid snaps might be casually hung in a home. --Oliver Giles Hong Kong Tatler

For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.--Emily Witt The New Yorker

Author Information

Allie Biswas is a writer and editor based in London. In 2021, she coedited The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960-1980, a compendium of rarely seen historical texts that address the role of art during the civil rights movement. She has published interviews with artists including Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Meleko Mokgosi, Zanele Muholi, Adam Pendleton, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Her essays have appeared in books on Serge Alain Nitegeka, Reginald Sylvester II and Woody De Othello, amongst other artists. Most recently, she has contributed texts to Portia Zvavahera (David Zwirner Books, 2023), Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, and Frank Bowling: Sculpture. She is currently editing a monograph about the artist Hew Locke.

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