Wolfgang Tillmans: Passages Silenciuex

The Espace Louis Vuitton München is proud to present Passages Silencieux, an exhibition dedicated to the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. This exhibition is a new chapter in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Hors-les-murs programme, designed to reach an international audience through the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Venice, Beijing, Seoul, Osaka and Munich. 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.

About the artist
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid (Germany). A major figure in contemporary art, Tillmans is working between Berlin (Germany) and London (United Kingdom). 

In the late 1980s, he first started experimenting with a Canon black-and-white laser photocopier, which he often describes as an initiatory milestone in his practice. From 1990 to 1992, he studied at the College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, before settling in London. He met London based gallerist Maureen Paley in Hamburg 1992 and Daniel Buchholz 1993 in Cologne, who organised his first solo exhibitions in London and Cologne respectively. In the late 2000s, he began transitioning from analogue to digital photography, while continuing to use analogue processes to create his camera-less works.

His first institutional exhibition was held in 1995 at the Kunsthalle Zürich (Switzerland). In 2000, he became the first photographer—and the first non-British artist—to receive the Turner Prize.

Since then, his work has been regularly highlighted across the world, notably in retrospective exhibitions at Tate Britain, London (2003); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006; traveled to Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, through 2007), USA; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2010; traveled to venues in South America including Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; and Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, Chile, through 2012); Kunsthalle Zürich (2012; travelled to Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, through 2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2012; travelled to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf in 2013); The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2015); Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2016); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2017); Tate Modern, London (2018); Rebuilding the Future, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2020); Today Is The First Day, Wiels Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, Belgium (2021); Sounds is Liquid, mumok – The Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria (2022); To look without fear, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, a travelling exhibition of work by the artist was presented across the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2022); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2023); and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2023). He took part in the 53rd Architecture Biennale in Venice (2009) and Manifesta10, Russia (2014). He became a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2012 and was elected to the Royal Academy in London the following year. 

Fragile, a traveling exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, organized by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Stuttgart, Germany, and traveled throughout Africa, with its last venue at Art Twenty One and Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria, in 2022.

In 2025, as its final exhibition before closing for a multi-year renovation, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, presented Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait / Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us, a site-specific solo exhibition conceived by Tillmans. The presentation was held in the museum’s vacated Public Information Library (BPI). Also on view in 2025 were the major solo exhibitions Weltraum hosted by the Albertinum in Dresden, Germany, and Ausstellung in Remscheid, Haus Cleff in the artist’s hometown of Remscheid, Germany, respectively.

Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris, France) has celebrated his work since its inaugural displays in 2014, and continues to do so. In 2023, the Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo presented the monographic exhibition Moments of Life with a selection of works by Wolfgang Tillmans from the Collection.

About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation’s seminal artistic statement.

Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than eleven million visitors from France and around the world. The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific “Hors-les-murs” programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.