Wolfgang Tillmans: Lumière du matin

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.

“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