Wolfgang Tillmans
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| Wolfgang Tillmans | |
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| Born | 15 August 1968 Remscheid, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Field | Photography |
| Training | Bournemouth and Poole College of Art |
| Awards | Turner Prize (2000) |
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 15 August 1968) is a German photographer who lives in Berlin and London. He won the Turner Prize in 2000.
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[edit] Life and work
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in Remscheid in Germany. He lived and worked in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s before moving to England. He studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art from 1990 to 1992. Since 1996 he has lived and worked in London. About his strong ties to both countries, Tillmann said in a 2007 interview with Robert Ayers from ARTINFO:
"I fell in love with England and with London when I was there on a language trip when I was 14. That coincided with me discovering Culture Club and the New Romantics and the whole of street culture. And the language and everything else speaks to me. But I don't think I'll ever lose my German-ness. You never lose the culture that you're from. England worked very well as an antidote to my German-ness. It's a good combination for me." [1]
Tillmans has published work in magazines such as i-D and Vogue, but he is mostly known for his use of multiple photographic genres (and the mixing of those genres) and his unique gallery presentation.[citation needed]
Since the mid-1980s, Wolfgang Tillmans has reinterpreted representational genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through the medium of photography. He employs a presentational practice that engages the dynamics of space, varying the size of his photographs based on the specific spatial setting of a venue and producing them as large inkjet prints and large framed C-prints. First recognized in the early 1990s for photographs of friends, street fashion and gay subculture, he has developed a highly distinctive style of image making that freely embraces a broad range of subjects—from experiences of the everyday, the homoerotic snapshot, to abstractions that result from experiments with the photographic process.[citation needed][original research?]
His exhibition strategies are unique and distinctive, and have changed the way in which photographic images are read and received in art galleries. An aspect of his artistic practice is to assume a curatorial role—he creates configurations with his photographs that draw formal, symbolic and ephemeral connections. His installations encourage active audience engagement and ask viewers to consider their own experiences within Tillmans’s visual world.
One of Tillmans's other chief modes of presentation is through the book form, and his numerous collections (see bibliography below) offer both extended studies of specific artistic interests such as in the book Concorde, while other books function in a way similar to his gallery installations and include images from several bodies of work, though Tillmans himself might say they are all a part of the same body.
Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000. He is the first photographer to have won the Turner Prize (and controversially, the first non-British citizen to have done so)1.
[edit] Bibliography
- Burg. ISBN 3822878812.
- Portraits. ISBN 1891024361.
- Concorde. ISBN 3883752738.
- Still Life. ISBN 1891771264.
- View from Above. ISBN 3775710841.
- Truth study center. ISBN 3822846406.
- Manual. ISBN 3865601324.
- If one thing matters, everything matters. ISBN 1854374850.
- Freedom from the Known. ISBN 3865212638.
- Wolfgang Tillmans. ISBN 0300120222.
[edit] References
- ^ Robert Ayers (July 5, 2007), [http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25314/wolfgang-tillmans/ THE AI INTERVIEW Wolfgang Tillmans], ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25314/wolfgang-tillmans/, retrieved on 2008-04-23
[edit] Contributions
2008 Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International [1]
[edit] Sources cited
"Wolfgang Tillmans," by J. Marcus Weekley, www.glbtq.com
[edit] External links
- Wolfgang Tillmans' Website
- Wolfgang Tillmans at Berliner Poster Verlag
- Shooting from the Hip, Art News, October 2007
