Haircut

2007
Wolfgang Tillmans

Glossy chromogenic colour print
61 x 50,8 cm

Portraits are a permanent feature of Tillmans’ work. His photos of close friends, strangers, and public personalities are intentionally spontaneous, without any use of artificial staging. They are characterized by a rare psychological intensity that Tillmans achieves by framing his subjects in a natural way, revealing the uniqueness of each model via their gestures, attitudes, and styles of clothing. Even though it seems impossible to identify the subject of Haircut (2007), photographed from behind, Tillmans manages, surprisingly, to create a moment of intimacy.

Hangs

Expressionist and contemplative works

From 17 December 2014 to 18 May 2015
Crossing views

From 23 September 2020 to 3 January 2021

Wolfgang Tillmans emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as a photographer of a libertarian post-punk youth who listened to techno music.

Since the late 1980s, Wolfgang Tillmans has developed a body of work that stretches the limits of photography and image making. His photographs which he presents taped to the wall, hung from clips or framed, revisit the traditional genres of portraiture, still life and landscape. Tillmans has also worked with the photocopier and has created abstract photographs made in the darkroom without a camera.

The Foundation has more than thirty works by Tillmans acquired since 2007 and, today, is pleased to be showing select works from that collection in Tokyo.

In 2000, Tillmans was the first non-British photographer and artist to receive the Turner Prize awarded annually by Tate in London. The Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna hosted a major Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition in 2021. The Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted a major retrospective to him in the fall of 2022. In Osaka, Japan, the National Museum of Modern Art showed his work in 2015.