The Brooklyn Rail

As the Centre Pompidou prepares to close its doors for five years of renovation, it entrusts its final exhibition to Wolfgang Tillmans—an artist whose work has consistently redefined how images can be made, seen, and shared. Bringing together more than 400 works, the exhibition has been curated by Florian Ebner, Head of Photography at the Centre Pompidou, under the title Nothing could have prepared us. Everything could have prepared us, chosen by the artist himself. The phrase exemplifies the dialectic that runs through Tillmans’s titles—a negation coupled with an affirmation. As Ebner explains, it is “equally personal and political,”¹ distilling the dual concerns at the core of Tillmans’s prolific practice, which spans photography, music, video, and beyond.

For this occasion, the museum’s president, Laurent Le Bon, sought an exhibition that would be both a statement and an experiment. Tillmans was invited not to occupy the museum’s customary galleries, but the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI), located on the second and third floors, levels often overlooked as visitors ride the escalators to the higher exhibition spaces. Instead of a white cube, the artist was given 6,000 m² of open-plan space in which to unfold his vision. Designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers as part of their radical 1977 vision for the Pompidou—an architecture that would come to define the late 20th century—the library is the only floor without partition walls, its span unsupported by a single beam. This feat was made possible by the Gerberrett, or Gerber beam, named after engineer Heinrich Gerber. With just one structural wall and a continuous band of windows admitting a diffuse but resistant natural light, one can begin to imagine the considerable curatorial challenge of staging a retrospective in this space.

That said, it is precisely under such conditions that Tillmans thrives. “No walls, that is the attraction of the space,”² he remarked. The artist considers “installation” an inherent element of his work. He engages with the totality of the space available, resisting the standardized approach to display in an institutional context. Instead, he arranges his works in ways that might recall a preparatory sketchbook for a project or a teenager’s bedroom adorned with posters. We find works next to a fire extinguisher, above a doorway, at eye level, or tucked into a corner.

By disrupting linear display logic through what he calls the “activation of the entire wall space and exhibition space,”³ he introduces a kind of visual democracy to his shows. No piece is inferior to another, no piece superior to another—a reasoning that elucidates the title of his 2003 Tate Britain exhibition: If one thing matters, everything matters. Yet there is an important caveat to this otherwise straightforward reading. As he explains: “every picture is potentially equal to another. We are all molecules—the spaces between the molecules in papaya and in my arms is relatively similar. There is potential to be equal or special, but it is not prescribed.”⁴ In this sense, Tillmans’s approach to photography echoes the liberal principle of equality of opportunity, often associated with John Rawls: fairness in the chance to become something special, rather than sameness of result, more closely tied to Marxist thought.

Thus, the exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between scale, where large prints are set against much smaller pieces—an arrangement evident from the outset. The State We’re In (2015), a large, 2.7 by 4 meter photograph of an all-consuming sea is juxtaposed with a nearby wall scattered with works no larger than a poster. This curatorial decision compels the viewer’s eye to shift, to focus and refocus, as it navigates the variety of formats on display. Variation extends beyond scale. The subjects themselves range widely, as do the dates of production. At first, no clear common denominator emerges. Tillmans, however, observes: “A multitude of subject matter, which is not actually infinite.”⁵ The images are never random: “they are carefully chosen.”⁶ The same holds true for format: “there are three fixed sizes that allow me to give the impression of it ever-changing, but there is an underlying matrix.” His arrangements reflect an ongoing observation of cause and effect. He continually adjusts the parameters of his shows, “hopefully recognising something just before something becomes cliché,”⁷ fine-tuning the audience’s experience. In this sense, his method recalls an experiment: variables are controlled, adjusted, and tested, with results measured in perception and response.

The outcome is not a fixed order but a shifting network. Tillmans’s photographs, taken together, are best understood as a constellation: a display that never settles into a single arrangement but continually generates new narratives and sensorial contexts. It is this open structure—a collective reading, as he puts it, “constructing [a] network of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject”⁸—that defines his approach. Within this constellation, portraits, still lifes, abstractions, and landscapes intermingle, each contributing to the web of connections that structures the exhibition.

However, when asked about his approach to staging scenes and the interplay between chance and control, Tillmans reflects: “language likes clarity and binaries.”⁹ Yet he has become aware that he “cannot offer this language model”¹⁰ when explaining the methodology underpinning his work. Instead, he speaks of the expected and the unexpected, the construction of truth in photographic representation, and the undeniable influence exerted by the presence of a camera. The line between staged and unstaged is therefore blurred, as his works alternate between instances of intervention—of varying degrees—and non-intervention. He remains alert, attentive, and responsive to his surroundings.

This attentiveness, combined with what he describes as “an acute sense of a visual ambition and a desire to invent,”¹¹ is captured in the retrospective. Tillmans tests the limits of his medium as well as the architecture that frames it. After all, he not only “invented a large unframed inkjet print, which at the time [1992] nobody was using”¹² due to its proneness to fading and overall instability, but also became renowned for his abstract works, most notably the “Silver” series and the “Freischwimmer” series (also featured in the show), created without a camera, relying solely on light and photosensitive paper. The former series works, reminiscent of mid-20th-century color field painting, formed part of the wide-ranging practice for which he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2000. Yet this drive for innovation is accompanied by a striking humility, manifested in his decision to display most works unframed, clipped directly to the wall. As he notes, this arose from a broader “zeitgeist shift from the 1980s to the 1990s […], away from Jeff Koons’s production values to more humble interests. Anti-glamour.”¹³ Considering Tillmans’s profound sensitivity to paper and his “deep sensual understanding of paper as a carrier for meaning,”¹⁴ it is hardly surprising that he insists on immediate, unmediated contact with the photograph, unrestricted by glass or frame.

This concern for immediacy did not prevent him, however, from expanding his practice in the 2000s. At this time, he began framing his large format photographs (2m x 1.35 m), in which “the print is floating, similarly to how the unframed sheet is floating,”¹⁵ thereby transforming them into “solid, defined objects with their very own quality.”¹⁶ Tillmans’s fascination with paper thus extends into questions of the medium’s multidimensionality, materiality, and existence as an object. Photography is, by nature, a reductive act: it translates a multidimensional reality into a flat copy. Yet Tillmans resists this reduction, playing with reversals of dimension—photographing objects that can appear flat or non-flat, such as clothing and seen in works like Faltenwurf (blau) (2020)—and creating sculptural abstractions such as the exhibited pieces from the “Lighter” series, born from a faulty developing process that folded the paper that he now frames in Plexiglas.

Underlying Tillmans’s diverse practice—and his guiding interests in “the alchemy of light” and “human interaction”—is a persistent striving for social equality. Acknowledging the potential of his platform to disseminate knowledge, he treats his photographs as amplifiers of critical issues in the public realm. His work gathers and multiplies channels of personal communication, finding expression across books, magazines, postcards, newspapers, music, videos, voice recordings, and nightclubs, in what critic Johanna Burton has described as “various tactics of distribution.” In doing so, he resists the exclusivity paradigm of the art market and makes his work accessible in a distinctly utilitarian way. A notable manifestation of this political engagement are the Truth Study Centres present in the show—tables displaying newspaper clippings, reports, notes, and photographs, part archive and part cabinet of curiosities, conceived as a research project into political truths. These works evoke the model of Truth Commissions: mechanisms of restorative justice in post-conflict societies, aimed at reconciliation through public testimony and the revelation of hidden truth. Although Tillmans is less concerned with addressing a single historical injustice than with sparking debate—seeking, in his words, to “serve as a political spokes tool”¹⁷—the aims are parallel. If Truth Commissions arise in the aftermath of conflict, the Truth Study Centres are preventative: spaces for questioning, dialogue, and reflection that attempt to forestall such crises in the first place.

In this sense, the choice of the library as the site of Tillmans’s retrospective carries a symbolic resonance. Long attuned to the possibilities of paper—as carrier of meaning, as object, as medium—and equally invested in the circulation of information, debate, and dissent, his practice finds a natural counterpart in the BPI. It is a space of books and ideas, of knowledge shared and contested and thus, to stage the final exhibition here is to draw attention to Tillmans’s lifelong commitment to dissemination, from Between Bridges, a non-profit arts space run by the artist, to the pages of magazines and newspapers, but also to the library itself as a vital part of the Pompidou’s architecture of access. As the Pompidou closes, the exhibition stresses the importance of the institution as a site of exchange and the urgency to finding new ways to sustain that spirit of curiosity, democracy and questioning, ensuring it continues to circulate openly and unpredictably, much like Tillmans’s images themselves.