In a 35-year career celebrated at MoMA this fall, the artist has concerned himself with “the poetry of looking,” blurring the line between party and protest. But, increasingly, it’s politics on his mind.
BERLIN — It was shortly after 11 a.m., and Wolfgang Tillmans’s studio was coming to life. Assistants had gathered in a corner of the huge, light-filled space and were running Tillmans through their plans. Hundreds of artworks were packed and ready to go, but there were a few busy days still ahead. Although masking is increasingly rare in Berlin these days, everybody’s face was covered. Tillmans was worried that a coronavirus outbreak could derail the final preparations for his most significant exhibition to date: “To Look Without Fear,” a career retrospective that opens at the Museum of Modern Art on Sept. 12 and runs through Jan. 1, 2023. His first major institutional show in New York, it had been postponed for 18 months because of the pandemic. Just a few days earlier, he and many of his staff had celebrated the opening of a new building around the corner that Tillmans designed himself, with his home and exhibition space. “Afterwards we were all in a bar, smoking and shouting,” Tillmans said, and made a face behind his mask. One of the studio workers later tested positive. With MoMA technicians due at the studio the following week to collect the works and take them to New York, the stakes were high. “To Look Without Fear” will be Tillmans’s largest ever show, occupying all of the museum’s sixth-floor galleries. It looks set to cement his position as one of the world’s most significant living artists, vindicating what he sees as a 35-year artistic mission that, because of its adjacency to youth culture and mass media, wasn’t always taken so seriously.