WOLFGANG TILLMANS - PASSAGES SILENCIEUX

A central figure within the Collection, Tillmans’s photographic constellations were already showcased in Fondation Louis Vuitton‘s inaugural show in 2014. His Passages Silencieux (“Silent Passages”) reaffirms the Fondation’s commitment to the artist‘s work, building on the success of the Centre Pompidou’s major retrospective, in Paris, which concluded on 22 September 2025 ahead of the museum’s renovation. The works presented here have been personally selected by the artist himself from the Collection.

Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid and is now working between London and Berlin. His practice has expanded the technical, artistic and thematic possibilities of working with photographic images. A witness to the transition from analogue to digital, he began to work with pictures through the use of a photocopier. He took up the camera to create his own pictures only after his first exhibitions with photocopy works in the late 1980s, and initially with the intention to photocopy them. His early-1990s photographs of youth, club and popular culture portrayed the generation of his contemporaries. Since then, his work has continued to open up a wide variety of genres and photographic practices. In his exhibitions and magazine portfolios, he presents his pictures in constellations, carefully positioning and arranging them in the exhibition space or the printed page respectively, creating fresh associations.

The display, which the artist arranged across both floors of Espace Louis Vuitton München, eschews chronology. The selected works span almost thirty-five years of his practice, weaving connections between various temporal and geographical moments and different atmospheres. Tillmans’s multifaceted portraiture with work dating from different times converse with photographs of plants, still life and abstract works made without a camera from the turn of the 2000s. These pictures interact with no hierarchy of scale or genre; some are framed and some are not. By weaving silent links between different pictures, Tillmans renews the relevance of each image for the contemporary viewer. These are as intimate as they are collective. They attest to the transformation of a world on the move made up of interconnected elements. The image is “a good starting point for thinking about the world”, says Tillmans.

While he draws our attention to features of his surroundings, he also reveals the material reality of his chosen medium. He began producing his own prints in the 1990s. Passages Silencieux highlights this experimentation. In certain works, like Berlin (2006), he emphasises the materiality of his images by re-photocopying and re-photographing existing prints or photocopies, sometimes enlarging them to highlight the texture of the paper and the idiosyncrasies of its inking. The uniqueness of a picture-making process unfolds in his camera-less abstractions with the series Einzelgänger (2003) being a striking example. Produced without negatives, these works encapsulate the essence of photography itself: they exist solely through the interplay of dry chemistry, between photosensitive paper and light. For Tillmans, these abstract creations – which he has exhibited alongside his figurative work since 1998 – represent a pause rather than a rupture.