Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019 (individual views)
Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) has contended with the boundaries of the photographic medium since the early 1990s. In his ongoing paper drop series, photo paper acts as both material and subject matter: the sheet is folded onto itself in a delicate teardrop shape and photographed with a very shallow depth of field.
Tillmans brings together five paper drops in this installation designed for four walls, allowing their similarities and differences to resonate with one another. The images appear both abstract and representational, self-reflexively acknowledging the medium’s physicality and ephemerality.
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Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019 (individual views)
Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019 (individual views)
Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019 (individual views)
Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019 (individual views)
“One evening in 2000, I was walking around my studio and I had this realization that everything I do is on paper. Soon after I made a picture of this big sheet of red photo paper, which I hung attached only on one corner. I observed how it curled and how the sharp sunlight brushed it, and how this paper was sort of falling. That’s how the name paper drop came about,” says the artist. “I always understood photography as objects, not just flat surfaces.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, paper drop (passage) I-V, 2019
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2013
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2017
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragile, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 2018
Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Your Body Is Yours, National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2015
please get in touch.