Wolfgang Tillmans, Lighter, white / pink and Lighter 116 (2020-2023 ), via David Zwirner
On view at David Zwirner’s New York exhibition space this fall, artist Wolfgang Tillmans marks his fourth solo show, demonstrating the artist’s expansive vision while meditating on the simultaneity of life and art. Titled Fold Me, the show will feature an entirely new body of work by the artist, and follows Tillmans’s major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the fall of 2022. Tillmans , who regularly invites an interplay of chance and control, of consideration and coincidence, of process and time here folds the world back onto paper.
The fold has been a recurring visual trope in Tillmans’s work since the 1990s, when he made his first Faltenwurf (Drapery) images. He developed the theme further in his paper drop and Lighter works, formalizing the fold as a concept that articulates the materiality of photography. For the artist, the fold collapses linear delineations and boundaries of separation, for instance between image and its carrier, and opens up the potential for reimagining the curvature of space. Provo, Utah and the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains (2023) and Lunar Landscape (2022) take the folds of Earth’s surface as their subject. The stark contrast between a flat urban landscape that encounters a mountain range and the effect of the full moon reflecting on the innumerable curves of the Atlantic’s surface results in almost diametrically opposite interpretations of landscapes, presented here as fragments of a larger whole that escapes containment.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Fold Me (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Tillmans’s examination of water in its different states punctuates the exhibition. Watering, a (2022) is a carefully composed still life that Tillmans made in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The image depicts bottle caps that appear to hover in midair, resting on the top segment of transparent plastic bottles alongside a water sachet—the most widely available form of safe drinking water in West Africa. In Power Station (Low Clouds) (2023) a plume of water vapor from a power station silently traverses a layer of low clouds, casting a shadow. The elegance of vapor on top of vapor can only disguise the messiness of our hunger for energy so much.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Fold Me (Installation View), via David Zwirner
The exhibition’s focus on inanimate subjects is juxtaposed with the inclusion of new portraits, among them two Iranian artists, a queer activist in Lagos, a Crimean Tatar refugee working in Toronto, and a New York–based film producer. These portraits attest to Tillmans’s ongoing investigation of what it means to depict a person. His portraits are at times long planned and at other times the result of unexpected interactions or in-the-moment encounters. Each of these portraits speaks of a distinct moment in history, and the relationship that each of these subjects maintains with their present. Interspersed in the exhibition alongside the artist’s figurative pictures are new Lighters, a body of work that Tillmans began in 2005. Explicitly not windows to something else, these non-referential photographic paper sculptures are folded in the darkroom before exposure or, at times, after processing. The colors and shapes are the result of Tillmans drawing with light sources on differently folded light-sensitive papers. As such, Tillmans’s Lighters have a three-dimensional physicality that carries an image of its own genesis.
The show makes much of space and performance in the execution of the image, exploring the artist’s own practice in interpreting and reinterpreting both his materials and body of work in new iterations. The show closes October 14th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Wolfgang Tillmans [Exhibition Site]
