Los Angeles, CA — The Hammer Museum presents the first major U.S. retrospective of the work of German artist Wolfgang Tillmans through January 7, 2007.  Co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago.  Wolfgang Tillmans features approximately 300 photographs, installations, and video spanning his entire career.  Tillmans is acclaimed as a chronicler of his generation, and he has garnered international recognition as one of the most significant artists to emerge in the 1990s.  His evocative photographs span the genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and documentary to reflect on often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life.

Wolfgang Tillmans is organized by Russell Ferguson, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, and Dominic Molon, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the MCA.  “Although many of Tillmans’s photographs are highly memorable, even iconic, they remain fundamentally untheatrical and rooted in a social context,” said Ferguson.

Wolfgang Tillmans is well known for the distinctive installations of his work, in which the artist carefully constructs wall montages that incorporate variously-sized, ink-jet prints with glossy photographs in seemingly random, yet deliberate, arrangements.  The entire Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Hammer will be hung in this way by the artist, allowing the installation to function as a work of art in its own right.  His presentations create a variety of new contexts in which the focus becomes the relationship among the images, rather than any individual image.  Without a rigid order, and with a mixture of framed and unframed works, the hanging activates all of the works in the space and blurs the boundaries of the traditional hierarchy in the subject matter. 

Tillmans reaches beneath the surface of contemporary culture to challenge established photographic conventions.   His work combines an energetic sense of immediacy with an appreciation of classical composition to produce intimate, stylish, and visually dynamic reflections of contemporary life.  Tillmans said, “I’m trying to go against this thinking that photos can only be accessed via their subject matter.  I think about the same questions that a painter would about the problems of representation.  I just found that photographs are the language that I speak best in.”

ABOUT WOLFGANG TILLMANS
Born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, Tillmans studied at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art in Dorset before moving to London.  Early in his career, Tillmans documented the European club scene in a manner that captured its dynamic style with an affecting sincerity, and he presented this work in carefully crafted spreads for British fashion and lifestyle magazines such as i-D.  He increasingly developed a signature style, intimately presenting subjects ranging from still lifes to portraits of friends and celebrities, subtly alluding to his interest in issues such as homelessness, racism, and gay rights.  Despite his use of magazine layouts as an early vehicle for his work, his provocative images always challenged the superficial gloss of the fashion industry and subverted notions of beauty and sexuality.

Perhaps the most critical and unifying aspect of Tillmans’s practice is his insistence on a “democratization” of images.  While certain works are notably singular and iconic, his use of a shifting scale for his prints and an ever-changing rotation of images with each successive installation demonstrates his desire to see all of his pictures as universally significant.  In doing so, Tillmans suggests that an unassuming image of jars of jam on a counter-top carries equal weight and importance as an image of a bolt of lightning or a political rally.  By applying the same clarity of vision and intensity of purpose to every picture—whether an image of a place, person, situation, or an abstraction—Tillmans offers a visually unified perspective on the diverse phenomena that comprise the broad spectrum of lived experience.

Since the 1990s, Tillmans’s work has turned increasingly toward abstraction.  The exhibition at the Hammer includes a gallery of his new, purely abstract works, which are created through the direct manipulation of light on paper, rather than the use of a camera.  Among the series he has produced in this manner are Blushes, Mental Pictures, and Freischwimmer. Despite their non-representational status, these images—particularly the lush Freischwimmer pictures with their sinewy or hair-like lines—still possess a tactility and physicality that gives them an almost “bodily” feel. 

In 2000, Tillmans won the prestigious Turner Prize.  His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at numerous international museums, most recently at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2004); the Tate Modern, London (2003); the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2003); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2002); and the Diechtorhallen, Hamburg (2001).  Tillmans’s work has also been included in major group exhibitions such as Covering the Real: Art and the Press Picture from Warhol to Tillmans at the Kunstmuseum Basel (2005); Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002); Uniform at the Stazione Leopolda, Florence (2001); and The British Art Show 5 at the Hayward Gallery, London (2000); among many others.

Wolfgang Tillmans studied at the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art in Dorset, and lives and works in London.  He won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000 and has exhibited his work internationally in solo exhibitions at such museums as Tate Modern, London; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
A fully illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition, and features essays by the exhibition curators, Russell Ferguson, Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, and Dominic Molon, Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the MCA; art critics Daniel Birnbaum and Lane Relyea; artist Julie Ault; and architectural historian Mark Wigley.

ABOUT THE HAMMER MUSEUM
The Hammer Museum is dedicated to exploring the diversity of artistic expression through the ages, recognizing that artists play a crucial role in all aspects of culture and society.  The Museum’s programming spans the classic to the cutting-edge, presenting exhibitions of historical and contemporary art, architecture, and design alongside selections from its permanent collections.  Founded by Dr. Armand Hammer in 1990, the Museum’s collections include The Armand Hammer Collection of Old Master, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings; The Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection; The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, containing more than 45,000 works on paper; and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden on the UCLA campus.

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