The artist’s expansive museum survey opens September 12 in New York
February 18, 2022
The Museum of Modern Art will present Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the artist’s first museum survey in New York, from September 12, 2022 through January 1, 2023. Unique groupings of approximately 350 of Tillmans’s photographs, videos, and multimedia installations will be displayed according to a loose chronology throughout MoMA’s sixth floor. Organized by Roxana Marcoci with Caitlin Ryan and Phil Taylor, the exhibition will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art following its run at MoMA.
Informed by new scholarship and eight years of dialogue with the artist, the exhibition will highlight how Tillmans’s profoundly inventive, philosophical, and creative approach is both informed by and designed to highlight the social and political causes for which he has been an advocate throughout his career.
From the outset of his career, Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Germany) has revolutionized the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, making connections between his pictures in response to a given context and activating the space of the exhibition by hanging photographs in a corner, above a doorframe, on a free-standing column, or next to a fire extinguisher. In developing his own language for these overall installations, Tillmans’s practice verges into a sculptural dimension. The decisive logic of his practice is a visual democracy, best summarized by his phrase “If one thing matters, everything matters.”
Read more about the exhibition at ARTnews and learn more at MoMA.
Cover image: Wolfgang Tillmans, still life, New York, 2001 (detail). Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York / Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne, Maureen Paley, London