MoMA to Stage Extensive Wolfgang Tillmans Survey in September – ARTnews.com

Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the most influential photographers working today, will be the subject of a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. Set to open this September in New York, the show, titled “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” will be one of the Berlin- and London-based artist’s biggest outings to date. After its run at MoMA, the exhibition will head to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
A typical Tillmans exhibition presents a form of controlled chaos, with a profusion of photographs arrayed in unusual, asymmetrical arrangements in which very few pictures are shown in frames. The MoMA show promises to be just as unorthodox in its hang, with works appearing in doorways and corners, and with some of those photographs stuck to the wall only by pieces of tape. The show is expected to include more than 350 works, making it an appropriately epic affair for a photographer who has shot thousands of pictures.
In an interview, Roxana Marcoci, the MoMA photography curator who is organizing the show with Caitlin Ryan and Phil Taylor, traced the exhibition’s origins back to the 2014 Manifesta biennial in St. Petersburg, Russia, in which Tillmans was a participant. At the opening of the biennial, the two got to talking, and they went on to have conversations over the course of eight years that resulted in this retrospective, which will follow a book of Tillmans’s writings that MoMA published earlier this month.
“It became a cosmology of how Tillmans thinks not just about photography but also music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality, and activism,” Marcoci said. “He’s a very rich thinker and looker, and a wonderful human being.” Wolfgang Tillmans, The Cock (kiss), 2002. Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York and Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin and Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London Describing Tillmans as an “amplifier of social and political causes,” Marcoci continued, “He has such a spectrum. It’s very rare that a photographer is so gifted as he is in working all genres. His approach to art-making is very concerned with the possibility of making connections and forming togetherness.”
The only style that can be ascribed to Tillmans is that he doesn’t have just one—he has shown photographs in just about every genre, seemingly by any thinkable means. Having risen to fame for his striking pictures of youth culture for i-D during the ’90s, he has gone on to shoot still lifes, documentary photographs, nudes, abstract photography, and more. German nightlife, queer communities, Frank Ocean, landscapes, and many other subjects have passed before Tillmans’s camera, which he has also used to document his life with H.I.V.
Tillmans’s aspiration is to “create a world I want to live in,” as he said in a statement about his MoMA show.
This is not the first time New York has gotten a Tillmans survey—that would be back in 2006 at MoMA PS1, when the artist had his first show at a gaming U.S. museum. But Marcoci said this survey will be even more ambitious, given that it will cover the whole of Tillmans’s expansive output to date.
And, unlike most retrospectives of this kind, the checklist for this show won’t be entirely fixed until just before its opening. Although Marcoci and Tillmans have worked together to hone the overall arc of the show over the years, the photographer will arrive in New York with more works than can be exhibited and likely switch them around until the last minute. “I like the idea that this exhibition is alive—it’s not stagnant or calcified,” Marcoci said.