Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

The present work relates to Wolfgang Tillmans's ongoing Faltenwurf series; photographs depicting clothes strewn on the floor or across furniture. Bridging several genres, Tillmans himself refers to them as suggestive of how figuration and abstraction coexist within his oeuvre at large, as well as of the tripartite relationship of photography to surface, three-dimensionality, and sculpture. As he has noted, clothes “are hugging our skin and in the process of that they carry an imprint of the body….they become sculptural objects….In this sense the Faltenwurf (Drapery) pictures are at the same time abstract pictures, and about the social surface that we carry around with us in our clothes.”¹ The works, in turn, relate to Tillmans’s Paper Drop and Lighter series, the former showing folded photographic paper and the latter presenting the paper folded as a spatial object.

¹ Wolfgang Tillmans, "Artist’s writings," in Wolfgang Tillmans (London: Phaidon, 2014), p. 154.

(includes all editions) 

Madrid, Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Wolfgang Tillmans, October 26, 2019 - January 4, 2020.