Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany) studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in Bournemouth, England, from 1990 to 1992. Relentlessly pushing to find ways to make new pictures in our image-saturated world, Tillmans has, throughout his career, explored and integrated photography’s many genres, techniques and presentation strategies. In 2000, Tillmans was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, an award given annually by Tate in London. In recent years, Tillmans has been more directly involved in political activism. In tandem with his ongoing Truth Study Center project (begun in 2005), he has created posters for the anti-Brexit campaign in Britain and in response to right-wing populism in Germany. Fragile, a major touring solo exhibition of the artist’s work, opened in 2018 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain et Multimédias in Kinshasa, with the final stop taking place at Art Twenty One and CCA, Lagos in 2022.

Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans, August self portrait, 2005. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London.

From the Archives

  • 2023 / core / exhibition

    Wolfgang Tillmans
    To look without fear

    Art Gallery of Ontario
    Wolfgang Tillmans’s first museum survey in Canada foregrounds how the German artist has married photographic image-making with social critique by pushing the conventions of the medium, developing new worlds of abstract photography, and epitomizing a new kind of subjectivity. In 400+ works, the exhibition presents the richness of Tillmans’s artistic practice, grounded in his conviction that an artist’s role is to be “an amplifier.”
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