Wolfgang Tillmans, 3 Vol. Box

Dirty realist heaven

Tillmans times three

Accept no substitutes: Wolfgang Tillmans could well be the coolest photographer on the planet. Always imitated, never bettered, he's the lens-meister of the zeitgeist, the photo-journo who went artside, a man in constant demand, moving effortlessly from magazine to fashion shoot to gallery retrospective. He creates identities, he's the brand name of hip. From Ray Gun to i-D, his images feel iconic before they're out of the fluid. I'll be your mirror, he whispers, and the Gen X-kids find themselves reflected in his always open pictures.

From the portraits that made him famous, through the still lives and landscapes (undermining the genres with every shot), Tillmans's work is high color, dirty realist heaven. Finding the still point in the information overload, the sexuality in the machine, and the image in the image saturation, Tillmans gives us the brief epiphanies we might just remember as our own.

TASCHEN's 3 Wolfgang Tillmans books packaged together as a special set: Tillmans, Tillmans Burg, and Truth Study Centre.

Forthcoming solo exhibitions
Zacheta, Warsaw, 18 November 2011 – 31 January 2012
São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (opening January 2012)
Kunsthalle Zurich (opening 31 August 2012)


The photographer:
Wolfgang Tillmans was born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968 and studied at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work, whilst appearing to capture the immediacy of the moment and character of the subject, also examines the dynamics of photographic representation. From the outset he ignored the traditional separation of art exhibited in a gallery from images and ideas conveyed through other forms of publication, giving equal weight to both. His expansive floor to ceiling installations feature images of subcultures and political movements, as well as portraits, landscapes, still-lives and abstract imagery varying in scale from postcard- to wall-sized prints. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1996 and Tate Britain, London, in a major retrospective in 2003. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2000.