Wolfgang Tillmans
View from above
February 20 - May 5, 2002
Castello di Rivoli
Press Office, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art
ph. +39/011.956520
Wolfgang Tillmans, Podium, 1999.
Curated by Giorgio Verzotti.
International critics consider Tillmans one of the most innovative photographers of his generation. The artist became well known in the early 1990s with photographs that, on the one hand referred to pop and alternative culture and addressed sexual taboos, and on the other hand proposed an esthetic outside the usual mold. His works appear not only in publications such as Interview, Index and the English alternative magazine i-D, but also are used by the mass media and recognized by an increasingly broad public.
In 2000 Tillmans was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded by Tate Britain in London. Mary Horlock, curator of the catalogue, writes: “Tillmans is an artist who considers issues of esthetics and conventional codes of representation. [] he pushes beyond the surface of contemporary culture and encourages us to do the same.”
Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid (Germany); from 1987 to 1990 he lived and worked in Hamburg, where he had his first solo exhibitions, and then moved to England, where he attended the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design. In 1994-1995 he lived in New York. Since 1993 he has exhibited in Cologne, Frankfurt, Zurich, London, Paris, New York and Berlin. In 1995 the Kunsthalle in Zurich held a solo exhibition of his work; that same year he had exhibitions at Portikus in Frankfurt and then in Los Angeles and London. The following year his exhibition schedule included a solo show at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg; in 1997 he had his first solo exhibition in Italy, at the Galleria S.A.L.E.S. in Rome.
His more recent exhibitions include a solo show at Espacio Uno, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, in 1998, and Soldiers, at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, in 1999. Tillmans has participated in extremely prestigious group exhibitions, including Apocalypse, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2000); Quotidiana, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli (2000); Zero Gravity, Kunstverein and Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (2001); Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London (2001). After being presented at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Tillmans’ solo exhibition View from above will be seen on the third floor of the Manica Lunga of Castello di Rivoli, before moving on to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, from June 8 to September 15, and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, from October 11 to January 19 2003.
This exhibition presents a new phase in the artist’s work, where he is showing ink-jet prints of an abstract nature, along with his photographs. The process of abstraction is achieved not only in the darkroom, but also can take place as the result of a particular shot: a foreground of a teacup, the folds in a garment, the detail of a snow-covered street. In the catalogue, Giorgio Verzotti writes of the most recent pieces: “Tillmans’ recent work is a double register of images and abstract signs that coexist and run on parallel tracks. The realistic photos run up against the large surfaces where pure formal and chromatic values reign, which the artist names according to their formulation. These are works created without the camera, through a complex manipulation of light in direct contact with photosensitive paper [].”
Catalogue by Charta, Milan. Text by Giorgio Verzotti and interview with Nathan Kernan.
MM
For more information go to: www.e-flux.com/site2002/index.phtml?client=welcome/castello
