s Fall / Winter 06 07 - Steidl

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Wolfgang Tillmans
Freedom From The Known
Freedom From The Known is Wolfgang Tillmans’ first major solo exhibition for an American museum, and unlike any he
has ever previously mounted. The exhibition shown at P.S.1/ MoMA focuses on the artist’s purely abstract photographs,
and explores the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Twenty-four of the
twenty-five large-scale works onview were produced specifically for this exhibition and have never been shown before.
“This group of pictures grew together whilst I was working on this project. I thought about how to express in a simple
but not blunt way an awareness of exhibiting in a country whose politics fill me with a great deal of fear and anger. There
is a glaring dichotomy of working with pure abstraction, which is extremely removed from literal political content, and
the personal sense of urgency that dominates much of my waking hours. Yet I feel the purely abstract works and nondirect
political contentphotographs are my freedom of expression, my resistance to feeling completely dominated by
the fall-out of a world bent on reviving ideologies and interested in erecting borders and barriers and [inciting] hatred
between people.” Wolfgang Tillmans
Most of Tillmans’s works in this book are “camera-less” – pictures made by the direct manipulation of light on paper,
rather than on a negative. Alongside the abstract works, a group of figurative/representational photographs from the
series Empire, based on pictures Tillmans made between 1991 and 2002, are on view. The original pictures used for
Empire were either passed through a photocopy or fax machine, then scanned to the highest possible resolution,
turned into large-scale C-prints and framed. Due to the large format, minor surface incidents are intentionally
enhanced, along with the grain and grit.
The German-born and London-based Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) has been the subject of numerous museum and
gallery exhibitions over the past fifteen years. He was a recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, awarded by
Tate Britain. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago will present his first American museum retrospective
opening in May, 2006.
Co-published with MoMA/P.S.1, New York.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Freedom From The Known
Essay by Bob Nickas
Book design by Wolfgang Tillmans
80 pages with 8 duotone and 18 color plates
9 x 11 in. / 22.5 x 27.7 cm
Clothbound hardcover
US $ 25.00 / £ 14.50 / R 20.00
ISBN 3-86521-263-8
ISBN-13 978-3-86521-263-4
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