Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us”

At this point in Wolfgang Tillmans’s career—following his era-defining editorial work, becoming the first foreign-born winner of the Turner Prize, and poster campaign for the UK’s EU membership—he is arguably the most totemic European artist of his generation. But his takeover of the Centre Pompidou’s library is pointedly not a retrospective, nor a thematic survey. So, what is it? And what is its foreboding, recriminatory title about? Several hundred works are installed across the 6,000-square-meter space of the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI), in a typically bewildering array of forms, formats, and hangs. Organized into abutting spatial chapters, the titling of each section—“The State We’re In,” Metamorphosis of Space,” “Shelves”—seems deliberately ad hoc.

This impression is compounded by the exhibition’s companion booklet, which gives commentary only on a selection of works. In the entrance space of the show, “History Now,” the guide explains Markt (b) (1989) as an image of a street market by the East Berlin border, days before the fall of the Wall: taken when the artist was twenty, at the dawn of a new, more plural, hopeful, and interconnected Europe. So far, so Tillmans (and so far away does this vision seem in 2025). However, the dominatingly vast tropical landscape hung adjacent to it goes unmentioned, the significance of its delicately suspended raindrops left open. A metaphor for the torrent of historical events? An allusion to climate change? Or just a suitably beautiful and technically impressive opener?

The slightly dazed state this presentation invites is one Tillmans seems to enjoy. He’s excellent at finding moments of estrangement: inane taglines on a bag of salad (Love Life, 2016), or an airport sign that asks, “What is a liquid?” Information, and its uneven distribution—the decisive, inevitably partial role that context provides—seems here, in fact, one of the artist’s abiding concerns. Alongside a new iteration of “truth study centre” (2005–ongoing), in which the artist juxtaposes “texts of great lucidity and awareness with absurd, humorous and also crazy false statements,” the installation Library shelves with an unusual amount of space around them (2023/25) presents a drastically reduced selection of the library’s old stock, a sort of plangent archaeology of knowledge.1 The winning new installation BPI Portraits (2024) comprises a hive of video portraits of BPI users, each screened on a monitor installed on an individual desk. Shot close-up, softly lit by desk lamps, these videos have an almost trancelike quality, their subjects drifting unassumingly in information’s flow.

The artist’s instructions to the sitters for the piece, as reproduced in the guide, emphasize that “the main thing is to behave exactly as you would on an ordinary day at the BPI.” Though present in his earliest works, naturalism has become the increasingly pronounced ethos of Tillmans’s portraits; the staging or manipulation of the subject seen in the breakthrough Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees (1992), or the striking photocopier works made in 1987 for the Front nightclub, where the subjects’ images are distorted and swirled about, like oil, appear here as exceptions. Instead, émigré barbers, niche booksellers, Japanese laborers, and millionaire celebrities are each alike blanketed with a “come as you are” universalism. If these portraits are committed to the deep equality and humanity that, say, a metal factory worker and Jodie Foster share, they seem less interested in what they don’t share: what makes one sitter’s form of life different from another’s.

The easeful grandeur that Tillmans brings to his subjects stems, I think, from his fundamental generosity. That kindness is evinced here by displays dedicated to his art space, Beyond Bridges, that features works by other artists whose careers he has supported; there is a section just for celebrations of medical workers (and another with the somewhat desultory theme of “Africa”). But beyond this, a kind of magnanimity of attention is still the essence of this work. In the room where the recent video Wild Carrot (2024) screens, I saw a room of visitors rapt as the camera darts in and out around the single titular stem. At the other end of the show, a humble agricultural cloth, reflective to protect plants from the sun, has been hung along a wall as Rideau (Curtain) (2023/25). Its silvery cascade an unfurled declaration that something utilitarian and overlooked can also be a field of gorgeous, light-gathering drama.

“If one thing matters, everything matters.” I still sometimes return to the title of the artist’s 2003 Tate survey as a call for care and equanimity. But in the political landscape of 2025 it also lands with an all-too-convenient vagueness. Does Gaza matter? Among images for marches for trans rights and Black lives, against travel bans and Boko Haram, recognition of the ongoing grassroots movement for Palestinian solidarity is noticeable by its absence: an unexpected omission for an artist whose work is, per the guide, “shaped by consistent engagement with the present moment.” What hangs among these works instead is a single image, Jerusalem Wall (2009): a wide-angle shot in which the titular wall divides new white buildings from an empty plot, brown earth on both sides. Without a person in sight, the image doesn’t have the active charge of the protest images: in a way, it’s languorously beautiful. The register isn’t urgent, but rather sadly resigned: one more tile in a complex, ongoing mosaic of human experience.

I wonder if occasionally the artist’s empathy results in a kind of equivocation (a 2017 photocopy work here reads “How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?”). If everything matters, after all, how do we choose one thing over another? Susan Sontag—whose love of aphorism, sometimes awkward bridging of intellectualism and activism, and evolution from a defense of the underground to an almost old fashioned Europhilia bears comparison with Tillmans—once gave her idea of a writer as “someone interested in everything.”2 I imagine that, for Tillmans, a photographer is someone who loves everything. It’s churlish, even impossible, to be entirely unmoved by this liberal, openhanded spirit. But by trying to love everything, do we risk not really loving at all?