Summer party

  • 2013
  • Wolfgang Tillmans
  • Impression jet d'encresur papiermonté sur Dibond
  • Inkjet print on paper mounted on Dibond aluminium in artist's frame
illustration

Throughout his career, Wolfgang Tillmans has captured the vulnerability of bodies, people, and objects. His works embody a new form of subjectivity in photography, combining intimacy and fantasy with social critique and a constant questioning of established values ​​and hierarchies.

Portraiture is a recurring theme in his practice. Whether depicting close friends, colleagues, strangers, or public figures, his portraits possess a rare psychological intensity, the artist revealing the uniqueness of each of his subjects. He creates empathy through sustained attention.

Although it sometimes seems impossible to identify the subject of the portrait (In the Morning, 2015), the work paradoxically creates a feeling of profound intimacy.

The group scenes reference famous paintings from art history, such as Summer Party (2013), which echoes Édouard Manet's famous painting, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" (The Luncheon on the Grass).

Crédit artiste : © Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans

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.

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illustration