Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans (born August 16, 1968, Remscheid, West Germany) German photographer whose images of the everyday span from street photography to portraiture to landscape and still life to abstraction. In 2000 he became the first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize, and he was a recipient of the Hasselblad Award in 2015.

Tillmans first experimented with photography in 1987 by enlarging found photographs with a photocopier. He bought his first camera the following year. In the late 1980s he immersed himself in the club scene and gay nightlife in Hamburg and began taking pictures at that time. He submitted those photographs to the British magazine of fashion and contemporary culture i-D, which published them. He continued to publish his work in that magazine into the 21st century. In 1990 he moved to Bournemouth, England, to study art for two years at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. He settled in London in 1992 and the next year exhibited an unframed photograph from his Lutz & Alex series—casual portraits of two decidedly androgynous friends—at Unfair, an art fair in Cologne for emerging artists. As a result of that exhibition, his career took off in Europe. Art book publisher Taschen produced a book of his work in 1993, and Tillmans began exhibiting frequently. He also found success in New York City and exhibited widely while living there in 1994–95 and onward. He continued to rely on i-D and other magazines, however, as a regular venue for his work.

In 1997 Tillmans created a now well-known series of seemingly mundane images documenting the last month in the life of his partner, Jochen Klein, who died of AIDS. Following Klein’s death, which had a notable impact on the photographer, Tillmans’s work gained a stronger political angle, and he became a more vocal advocate for the LGBTQ communities. His was the winning design for an AIDS memorial in Munich (installed 2002).

In 2000 Tillmans was the first photographer as well as the first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize, presented annually to a contemporary artist by Tate Britain. He was recognized with the prize for both his photography and his inventive exhibition design. Tillmans was deeply involved in the display of his work (in print or exhibition). He often organized his photographs in the form of a grid on white gallery walls, sometimes framed and sometimes hung with clips, tape, or pushpins. In the early 2000s Tillmans experimented with photographic processes to create abstracted works. The series Freischwimmer (2000– ) was made without using a camera. Instead, Tillmans worked with chemicals on photographic paper to create colourful swirling images that he then enlarged on an ink-jet printer for exhibition. Other series of abstract works include Silver (1998– ), Blushes (2000– ), and Lighter (2005– ), the latter of which takes on three-dimensionality. In 2014 Tillmans traveled to Russia, where he interviewed and photographed a number of members of St. Petersburg’s gay community, who told personal stories of ostracism by antigay laws. He published their stories and portraits in a special activism issue of i-D magazine.

Tillmans’s work has been recognized with numerous exhibitions, including a retrospective at Tate Britain in 2003 (“If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters”), a traveling retrospective organized in 2006 by Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and two more in 2012, one at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the other at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. In 2015 he won the Hasselblad Award, presented annually to an outstanding contemporary photographer by the Hasselblad Foundation. Beginning in 2006, he operated and curated Between Bridges, a nonprofit gallery located in London through 2011 and in Berlin since 2014.