Wolfgang Tillmans: Lumière du matin

Galerie Chantal Crousel is delighted to welcome back Wolfgang Tillmans for the opening of his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Throughout his career Wolfgang Tillmans has challenged the potentiality of making pictures and has brought a new kind of subjectivity to photography. He explores traditional genres such as portraiture, still life, or landscape with a constant interest in the limits of visibility by pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique—thus questioning the existing values and hierarchies. Through the integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, Tillmans expands conventional ways of approaching photography and addresses the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world. 

In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, from Tate, London. From 2003 to 2009, Tillmans served as a professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Tillmans was the recipient of the 2015 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography and in January 2018, he was awarded the Kaiserring prize from the city of Goslar in Germany.

The Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, will welcome Wolfgang Tillmans for a major solo exhibition in 2021 and The Museum of Modern Art, New York for a survey exhibition in 2022.

“The political significance, the political readability of surfaces is something I have been interested in from an early age—even if it is the surface of a torn pair of jeans, which leads us to questions of what we consider to be beautiful.” —Wolfgang Tillmans