Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

Wolfgang Tillmans’ art sets him apart: he’s the first photographer, and the first foreigner, to win Britain’s renowned Turner Prize. A German living in London, he is currently exhibiting at the Tate Britain – which is traditionally devoted to British art.

Born in Remscheid in 1968, Wolfgang Tillmans gives artistic expression and permanence to passing personal moments. After graduating from high school, he left the town of Remscheid for London via Hamburg. The inventor of the “snapshot aesthetic”, in which carefully composed photographs take on the semblance of snapshots, Tillmans made a name for himself as a commercial photographer for magazines like i-D, The Face and Interview. His shots of the club and festival scene, to which he himself belonged, catapulted him to fame as a chronicler of his generation. He won the Turner Prize for contemporary art in the year 2000 for the arrangement of 57 of his stills at the Tate Britain – and with it came international acclaim.

The beauty of the moment

Tillmans’ early works often feature friends and acquaintances of his. The artist’s immediate experience is rendered public, including moments of intimacy. But the seeming spontaneity of the instant is misleading: his “snapshots” are in point of fact carefully composed, perhaps re-felt or rediscovered moments from his past. Each picture is planned out, thought through, almost abstractly arranged, and yet paradoxically each seems to capture and convey a fleeting moment. As a result, the point of view is never voyeuristic. Wolfgang Tillmans never betrays his subjects.

Nor are his subjects limited by considerations of quality or quantity: they include the ranks of supermodels, scurrying mice on the subway tracks or fruits on a windowsill. He shoots whatever catches his eye, for everything is of equal intrinsic value: what counts is ever and always the beauty of the instant.

Deer Hirsch (1995), for instance, shows a young man and a stag facing each other: the contact between man and beast is one of mute curiosity in which the human’s hands, playfully helpless, imitate the shape of the animal’s antlers. In his relentless search for the perfect moment, Tillmans’ approach is closer to that of Henri Cartier-Bresson than to the austere documentary style of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, however, he never conceals his camera and always somehow involves his subjects in the creative process.

In more recent works like Icestorm (2001), Tillmans modifies his images by means of chemical manipulation during the development process. Blotches of colour are suspended like spattered blood above ravaged trees against a garish yellow sky, thus intensifying the drama of the natural spectacle. He goes further still in some of his other works, treating the photographic paper right in the dark room to produce strangely beautiful abstract images that seem mysteriously veiled.

Criss-Cross

Tillmans sticks or nails his unframed photos criss-crossing all over the gallery walls like a colourful mosaic or a rag rug. But there is method in his madness, for he thereby creates links and cross-references between the pictures on the wall, imbuing them with a new spatial dimension to transform the installation into a unified work of art. This is a deliberate departure from conventional exhibition techniques, in which photographs are framed and lined up in rank and file at eye-level.

The equivalence of motifs and formats is indeed the very motto of the show, “If one thing matters, everything matters,” at the Tate Britain (6 June – 14 September 2003). One can trace Tillmans’ artistic development and associations through seven rooms of photographs of all sorts and sizes. For the exhibition catalogue Tillmans selected over 2,300 works from his personal library, all of which are reproduced in the same format.

Towards the end of the London exhibition, Tillmans’ first video installation, entitled Light (Body) (2000–2002), leads us back to the artist’s roots. Mirrors and rotating disco balls, music and downlights allude to Tillmans’ early roots in the club scene and, concomitantly, to the basic elements of photography: light, reflection and shadow. Only Tillmans’ medium has changed: his camera has become mobile, the beholder becomes part of the installation.

A catalogue of his oeuvre compiled by Wolfgang Tillmans himself came out for the retrospective at the Tate Britain: If one thing matters, everything matters (Tate Publishing, ISBN 1854374850, £ 29.99). The German-language edition is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag (ISBN 3775713271, € 44). Taschenverlag in 2002 put out an overview of his works in English, French and German: Wolfgang Tillmans (Taschen Deutschland, ISBN 3-8228-1984-0, € 14.99).