Wolfgang Tillmans

If we had to define Wolfgang Tillmans’ work in a few words we would say that it is a persistent compilation of experiences designed to narrate the story of a life characterised by a vision of the everyday from a studied, poetic and artificial configuration.

Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968 and considered one of the reference artists for those who consider themselves the indispensable raw material of his work, Tillmans set out in the world of art by experimenting with photocopied images, playing with the possibilities of modifying their contents and reorganising the visual material that comes with them in contrast to the ones he captures with his camera. And so, if his tendency to experiment with the image is something that emerged in his adolescence, it was not until he moved from Hamburg to London towards the end of the eighties and had studied photography in Bournemouth and at Poole College of Art and Design between 1990 and 1992 that that practice turned to the construction of a language focusing on the expression of a way of understanding life from experimenting, altering, combining and accumulating images from the visual culture in which we all take part.

A former contributor to magazines such as The Face, I+D, Interview or Butt, an incisive reporter on young Britons in their leisure time, the creator of a style close to fake documentary and interested in altering the inflexibility of reality through apparently spontaneous but actually rigorously structured visual compositions, Tillmans gradually abandoned the representation of reality to concentrate in the mid-nineties on the possibilities of abstraction by exposing the photographic paper to different sources of light.

Frederic Montornès