Wolfgang Tillmans Invites Viewers to “Look Without Fear” in Museum of Modern Art

by Meryl Phair

In “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) walls are adorned with a photographic constellation of framed images, magazine pages, video projections, and unframed prints. The scale of the images varies, making each wall a textured visual experience. Through this style, the exhibit democratizes visual presentation and allows viewers to “enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives,” Tillmans has said.

The German photographer has been breaking boundaries in photography since his first 1993 exhibition at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne, Berlin where he first exhibited his experimental style of displaying his work. His photography has been defined by acute observation of his surroundings as well as an investigation of what it means to observe the world through a photographic lens. “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.”

The exhibit compiles work from Tillmans' career spanning three decades, showcasing the artists’ documentation of social movements, portraits, nightlife, abstract images, and more. Tillmans’ strong connection to music feeds into his work with the interplay of the wide-ranging collection giving an impression of movement and sound. Photographs of numerous musicians and DJs such as Damon Albarn, Smokin’ Jo (Joanne Joseph), and Frank Ocean are present in the collection.

The exhibit will be up at MoMA through January 1st, 2023, before traveling to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For more information about the exhibit look online at https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5440 or on the artist’s website at https://tillmans.co.uk/