Wolfgang Tillmans - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Germany

  • Literature


    Tate Britain, ed., Wolfgang Tillmans: If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters, London, 2003, p. 298 (illustrated); J. Hammond, “Wolfgang Tillmans: Freischwimmer, A German photographic artist swims against the tide,” Metropolis, Tokyo, December 2004 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    German-born, London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ rich and intimate pictures testify to the artist’s experimental spirit. Challenging the history of image consumption with magazine-style exhibition and a variety of photographic techniques, Tillmans has manipulated the conventions of photography and repurposed the photograph itself. His pictures expose a multitude of moments, yet become art objects rather than pictorial records. The present lot is an expansion on this concept. Exposing film directly to light in the darkroom, Tillmans creates “blushes” of two-dimensional planes of color. Reflective of his fractured figurative photographs, the work is an abstract and striking example of Tillmans’ artistic agility.
    Like everything in my work, they’re a mix of intention and accident… People can’t really think about pictures as objects… They’re still only a representation of what’s on them. The myriad formal choices that a photographer makes are always taken for granted or overlooked. I’m trying to go against this thinking that photos can only be accessed via their subject matter. I think about just the same questions that a painter would about the problems of representation. I just found that photographs are the language I speak best in. Wolfgang Tillmans in V. Aletti, “Wolfgang Tillmans: A Project for Artforum”, Artforum, February 2001

  • Artist Biography

    Wolfgang Tillmans

    German • 1968

    Since the early 1990s, Wolfgang Tillmans has pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium. Challenging the indexical nature traditionally associated with photography, his abstract and representational photographic bodies of work each in their own way put forward the notion of the photograph as object—rather than as a record of reality. While achieving his breakthrough with portraits and lifestyle photographs, documenting celebrity culture as well as LGBTQ communities and club culture, since the turn of the millennium the German photographer has notably created abstract work such as the Freischwimmer series, which is made in the darkroom without a camera.

    Seamlessly integrating genres, subject matters, techniques and exhibition strategies, Tillmans is known for photographs that pair playfulness and intimacy with a persistent questioning of dominant value and hierarchy structures of our image-saturated world. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer to receive the prestigious Turner Prize.

    View More Works

151

Supercollider (Refraction) C

2003

C-print.

68 x 57 in. (172.7 x 144.8 cm).
This work is from an edition of one plus one artist's proof.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for $88,900

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York