As the artist’s new solo exhibition Fold Me opens at David Zwirner in New York, he discusses the works on show, the future of digital photography, and what he listens to when he installs
A large portrait of a highway leading to New York City hangs on the back wall of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location. The photo reveals the arteries that connect the city’s systems, suspended above construction zones and factories that make it all possible. New York from New Jersey (2022) is riddled by the expectation of what might lay ahead in the cluster of skyscrapers, visible just under the clouds. On the other hand, this is an ever so slightly out-of-focus photo of New York from a distance on a gray day. Such is Wolfgang Tillmans’ world. “The clouds are everyday, not this spectacular scene. What I’m trying to achieve is a negotiation between the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of things which are all around us.”
Fold Me is the legendary artist’s first exhibition in New York since his major retrospective at MoMA last year. 77 images are presented in a wide range of scales, placed idiosyncratically across five rooms and three corridors. The variation in size keeps you glued to the wall, pacing back and forth to adjust from postcard to life-sized portraits. Among these images are depictions of geographic contours from afar in “Elk Creek in Meade County, South Dakota” (2023), and “Power Station (Low Clouds)” (2023).