BRUSSELS.- WIELS inaugurates 2020 with the first large-scale solo exhibition in Belgium of the artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Exhibited over two floors, Today Is The First Day presents work by the artist from the past three decades, while opening up onto the latest developments in his practice that will include new photography, sound and video works in a spatial constellation, conceived especially by Tillmans for WIELS.
Tillmans, one of the most influential artists of his generation, is known for pushing the limits of photography and image-making. In the late 1980s the artist began producing works by using the first generation of laser photocopiers that could create half-tone images. His first pictures were made by enlarging images, either found or shot by the artist. In the early 1990s Tillmans gained attention for his seemingly everyday images of his contemporaries and the emerging European electronic music and club scene, which he disseminated through the magazines devoted to the youth culture of the time, like i-D or Spex. This early work defined a new kind of subjectivity in photography capturing the nonconformist spirit of his generation, its subculture and sexual identities. Since then, Tillmans has deepened his research and ventured beyond photography to develop a decidedly multidisciplinary art practice engaged with the urgent social and political challenges of our time.
Tillmans’s ambition as an artist is nothing less than to capture the world we live in. His gaze privileges the overlooked details of our everyday life as much as astronomic phenomena that verge on the sublime. The artist also creates abstract works in the darkroom without negatives or a camera, but purely through the manipulation of light on paper. While anchored in photography, Tillmans’s multifaceted approach is reflected in the variety of media he works with, including photography, video, sound, performance, and music. Similarly, the artist employs various systems of display in each exhibition that are conceived as site-specific installations which blur categorization and defy hierarchy. This interconnectedness infuses Tillmans’s work and enjoins the audience to focus as carefully on the whole as on each element, leaving them the freedom to make their own connections.
Weaving its way across the wealth of media and the variety of his subjects, the notion at the core of Tillmans’s work is that of visibility. When does something become perceptible? What is the relationship between what we perceive and what we know? What impact do new technologies have on how we see the world? These questions reveal the political reach of Tillmans’s work. Since his first images, which bore witness to the new social and cultural paradigms brought into being by a generation marked by the AIDS crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tillmans has always shown a strong political consciousness. For several years now, his political commitment has ventured beyond the practice of art and into social activism and the defense of democracy and minority rights via his foundation, Between Bridges, and a number of pro-EU campaigns that he initiated.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, co-produced in association with the exhibition Rebuilding the Future, at IMMA, Dublin and published by Koenig Books. Conceived and designed by the artist, this book explores the developments in Tillmans’s work over the last three years. It includes two conversations with the artist, with journalist Patricia Hecht and geologist Dr David Chew, along with contributions by Devrim Bayar, Brian Dillon, Sarah Glennie, Olivia Laing, Eimear McBride, David Nash, Michaela Nash, Mark O’Kelly, Benjamin Stafford and Catherine Wood.
