European Traveling Survey
2001–2003
The artist’s first traveling solo exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans: View from above, presented his work at four museums across Europe. Following its debut at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, the show traveled to Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and finally the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring previously unpublished works and contributions by Zdenek Felix, Ida Gianelli, Jerôme Sans, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Poul Erik Tojner; the publication includes a conversation between Tillmans and Nathan Kernan, and an essay by Giorgio Verzotti.
View from above focused on the artist's abstract work in series begun in 2000 such as Blushes, Conquistador, and Mental Pictures. Consistent with Tillmans's practice as a whole, these explore different types of image-making, either through the artist's intervention or by chance during the process of producing the work. In Blushes, for example, thin marks on a wedding day sky the surface of inkjet prints are made by manually exposing photographic paper to various light sources in the darkroom before processing the picture. Although self-referential, these works nonetheless remain true to their medium—something that is important to the artist. As Tillmans explained in an interview in Art on Paper in 2001 (later reprinted in a Phaidon monograph), the Blushes works "do not do anything that photography doesn't do anyway, because they record light. . . . they are as truthful as any photograph can be." Other works in the show, including examples from the Conquistador and Aufsicht series, reflect Tillmans’s engagement with mistaken or unpredictable effects, such as black marks on the image resulting from interference by the technical equipment. In hisArtforum review of the exhibition, Wolf Jahn observed how the works demonstrated Tillmans's "preference for surfaces [in which] the dichotomy between being and seeming is replaced by the idea of an essential appearance. This may be the source of the genuinely unpretentious aspect that Tillmans grants the surfaces of things. . . . Many of the motifs evoke the impression of a pattern more than some dramaturgy that might underlie them."