tomorrow night London
An exhibition in two parts, the
installation in the ground floor gallery comprises work that oscillates between
black and white and almost monochrome colour photographs like Die
Schwärze, which depicts a melting glacier’s majestic curve around a black,
snow capped mountain. Surfaces vary from photographic paper, ink jet prints and
photocopies to the bent and creased photographs from his ongoing sculptural
series, Lighter. Tillmans has produced the Lighter series without
a camera, and as with all his photographs he considers the resulting works as
objects. This process of bending and folding lifts the work further out of the
two dimensions of the photographic image and into the space of the room where
they are able to reflect and interact. In a recent interview with Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Tillmans described these works as “compositions, but, at the same time,
an object has been inserted into them”*
The
photocopy works are another form of abstraction. Often associated with
appropriation and the recycling of existing images, Tillmans began using
photocopies in the late 1980s as a way to create ephemeral and inexpensive
original enlargements. Ceremony from 2007 depicts a traditional English
procession but the colour and detail that would anchor the scene in a specific
place and time are missing, creating ambiguity, and allowing space for new
interpretations. Your Dogs depicts two sleeping dogs obstructing a
pavement; by not conforming with the relentless pace of daily life, they
confront us with an alternative sense of freedom.
This
exhibition presents a series of interactions between nature and man-made
artefacts. In Non Specific Threat, spiders appear to invade an American
cityscape from the sky, and in Growth, a creeping plant engulfs its host
building whilst a young boy walks past, oblivious to the spectacle behind
him.
The first floor gallery contains a large multichannel
video installation combining previously unseen and rarely screened work from
1987, 1994 and 2003 with recent footage. Using minimal editing and ambient
sound, this series of observational videos are moving images rather than
narrative constructions. The installation of these works follows a logic
established through exhibitions of Tillmans’ photographs, emphasising the
connections and disjunctions between each piece. The presence of nature in the
work in the ground floor gallery is echoed upstairs by the close-up sequence of
a snail slowly traversing the artist’s hand. Another video observes the
incongruous combination of the 1990 hit record Wind of Change played by
street musicians in front of the Europacentre building in Berlin with its
rotating rooftop Mercedes sign.
Tillmans’ solo exhibition Lighter is on at the
Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin until 24 August. A new book also called
Lighter has been published by Hatje Cantz to accompany the exhibition and
brings together a large selection of photographs documenting installations of
Tillmans’ work over the last two decades.
Wolfgang
Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968 and lives and works in Berlin
and in London, where he also runs the project space Between Bridges. In addition
to Lighter, current and forthcoming exhibitions include solo shows at the
Museo Tamayo, Mexico and the Stedelijk Museum CS, Amsterdam, and the 55th
Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, History in the Making: A Retrospective of
the Turner Prize at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and Street & Studio:
An Urban History of Photography at Tate Modern and Museum Folkwang,
Essen.
Tate
Britain will present a major installation by Tillmans as part of the BP British
Art Displays from the end of May 2008.
*
Wolfgang Tillmans and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series, Vol.
6. Cologne: Verlag Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.
