Wolfgang Tillmans at the Pompidou is the best show of his career
Long before iPhones, the photographer captured a world of image overload — now his oeuvre feels moving and elegiac
It’s the last fling: the furniture has gone, bare rooms echo, you notice how filthy the carpets are, and the party is wild but mournful. So it is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, shutting this summer for five years’ refurbishment, its collection already relocated. Host for the closing bash is Wolfgang Tillmans, the German photographer who made his name taking pictures of 1990s rave culture and gay nightclubs, and won the Turner Prize in 2000. Entitled Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us, his exhibition dovetails highlights from those heady days with images seen through the darkening glass of recent years. It is the best show of his career.
Invited to occupy the Pompidou’s library, the Bibliothèque publique d’information, Tillmans curates an immense emptiness. Only a handful of books, shelves, computer terminals remain, dotted across 6,000 sq metres of grubby grey carpet. Disconsolate signage — “Politique”, “Education”, “Philosophie” — dangles over nothing. On the walls, Tillmans answers the silence with hundreds of his globe-trotting, sewer-to-sky images, spanning four decades: “rat disappearing”, “Tongues and Ears”, “tree filling window”, “Lagos Night Drive”, “Playing Cards, Hong Kong”, “Rock from Cameroon on Bread”, the flat rectangle “Himmelblau”.
The earliest, “Zeitungsjacket” (1985), a garment constructed from newsprint, made when he was 16, stands mockingly in a bookcase labelled “probabilities and statistics”. The latest, “Pompidou CLC photocopies” (2024-25), depicts the Pompidou’s facade and interior pipes, images enlarged and moved during scanning so that the solid forms become fluid, melting. They contrast with the library’s actual heavy blue tubes, vents and girders, and further destabilise the setting.
It’s insouciant and disturbing to see Tillmans’ banal, full-saturated-colour, jumbled photographs in this end-of-history, end-of-humanities mise en scène. Libraries embody the thirst for learning, knowledge ordered in discipline-by-discipline sections. Tillmans instead beams an endless Instagram-style feed of lush inkjet prints.
Long before iPhones snapped billions of photos daily, Tillmans staked his art on capturing, by sheer accumulation and apparently random display, a world of image overload. His seemingly casual photographs, in fact meticulously choreographed, were launched in fashion and music magazines such as i-D and Spex. Mementoes of what the Pompidou calls the “transformative spirit” of the 1990s, these give the show a nostalgic, sexualised charge: sweat-drenched, ecstatic Damon Albarn of Blur; Tillmans’ androgynous-looking friends “Suzanne & Lutz, white dress, army skirt” and “Alex and Lutz sitting in the trees”, nude save loosely draped raincoats, dangling among foliage like updated versions of Albrecht Dürer’s “Adam and Eve” in a German forest.
Depicting people at ease, relaxing, partying, Tillmans wanted to convey “a kind of freedom that was not being expressed honestly elsewhere”. Actually, such pictures in their contrived spontaneity are perfected versions of the informal pictures we were all already taking. What was new was that Tillmans put them in museums, and in fresh, breezy scenarios: frameless, pinned or taped to the wall, from postcard to epic scale, subjects, people, places mixed up, hierarchies abandoned.
At the Pompidou, “Lagos Still Life II” — mangos and a dragonfly — hangs next to a portrait of Zaur Abduraimov, Toronto hairdresser and migrant of Crimean Tatar ancestry. The military parade “Army (Moscow 2005)” marches alongside the languid domestic scene “Anders Stretching on the Carpet”. “Data Center Warm Air Outlets, Santa Clara”, a shot of air vents in Silicon Valley, faces “End of Broadcast IV”, flickering static from a pre-digital TV station in St Petersburg.
As with the ostensibly arbitrary images, Tillmans’ juxtapositions look haphazard but aren’t. Global connectivity is the theme, liberal agendas the message. Everywhere, intimacy and individuality (Anders and Abduraimov, free to express themselves) confront repression (the Russian army, media control). References to borders — “Empire (US/Mexico border)”, “JFK Security”, Gatwick’s “Immigration” signs, a pile of red “Passports” — are interwoven with Tillmans’ “Freischwimmer” photo-drawings, made with a handheld flashlight, tinted pale green or pink. Their floaty surfaces and tremulous lines, conjuring close-ups of skin or underwater scenes, symbolise free movement, metamorphosis, unfixed identities.
The images themselves, even the abstractions, are rarely striking. Tillmans doesn’t aspire to the formal grandeur of fellow German photographers Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth or Candida Höfer. But he is as ambitious: his monumentality comes from his vast, sprawling installations, the conceit that the varied, scattergun entirety — signifying democratisation, tolerance, openness — is greater than the sum of the parts. “Whatever I do is about picking examples, because you can’t show the whole world,” he says. “You always have to find the whole in extreme detail.” He called his 2003 Tate Britain retrospective if one thing matters, everything matters.
But if everything matters, nothing matters — and banality is boring. “Office Paper For Food Wrapping Recycling, Addis Ababa”? “Library shelves with an unusual amount of space around them”? Tedium is always a problem with Tillmans’ all-over exhibitions. What saves this one is time itself: history has caught up with the photographer, now 56. Nothing could have prepared us charts, regretfully, sociopolitical change, freedoms won and lost, during his lifetime.
Although he disdains chronological display, Tillmans will be remembered for that narrative. His opening shots at the Pompidou are “Markt” (1989), showing Polish traders arriving in Berlin, and “Money Exchange, Bahnhof Zoo” (1990), the end of the cold war. Tillmans was in his early twenties, and had come out at 16. His restless, optimistic, youthful spirit met the moment of opening borders, political hope, gay culture becoming mainstream — Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Madonna’s book Sex.
Tillmans always had an activist edge — “Nice here, but ever been to Kyrgyzstan? Free Gender Expression Worldwide” reads a 2008 banner — but in the 21st century it has intensified, becoming hectoring. The ongoing “Truth Study Centre” incorporates table-top journalistic displays about fake news: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, false proclamations about Aids in South Africa. The geopolitical liberal order was breaking down. “What is lost is lost forever”, his anti-Brexit posters warned.
Those proclamations look forlorn at the Pompidou, and one senses that lost forever, too, is something else: the distinctiveness of Tillmans’ medium itself. Today everyone posts images, no one pays attention. Diversity segues into sameness. Digital manipulation and AI have smashed the camera’s claim to truth.
Tillmans’ art is doubly embattled, by technology — “the idea that photography might never again be proof of what was or what is — but become something else entirely” — and politics: “culture is always the first thing autocrats seek to control.” Today he says of his nightclub scenes: “I would like to document for the future that it existed, that it cannot be taken for granted, and that there are only very few places in the world where such an intense way of being together so fluidly and freely is possible.” His oeuvre has never felt more moving or elegiac than here in the Pompidou’s hollowed-out library.
To September 22, centrepompidou.fr