Press Release
Wolfgang Tillmans
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
T +44 (0)20 7402 6075
F +44 (0)20 7402 4103
www.serpentinegallery.org
The Serpentine Trust is a limited
company registered in England
under number 2150221
It is an educational charity, which
is funded by Arts Council England
and Westminster City Council
Registered charity number 298809
VAT Number 466 5881 01
Printed on material that is Forest
Stewardship Council certified
26 June – 29 August 2010
The Serpentine Gallery presents Wolfgang Tillmans’ first major exhibition in London
since 2003. Conceived by the artist for the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition will
present both abstract and figurative work.
Over the past 20 years, Tillmans has redefined photography and the way it is shown.
Known by the early 90s for the seemingly casual images of the world he inhabited,
his work reassessed photographic conventions and reflected the identity politics of
the time, capturing the fragility of human life and focusing on everyday objects. This
early work then expanded to engage with portraiture, landscape, the still-life and,
more recently, abstraction. Tillmans’ abstract work, greatly celebrated in the last
decade, continues to push the boundaries and definitions of the photographic form,
and will be a particular focus of this exhibition.
The wide-ranging themes in Tillmans’ photographs are combined in his
reconfiguration of accumulated images, created in response to a given space. In
this new exhibition, the explorations into abstraction sit alongside a new focus on
the figurative – a focus that is increasingly informed by recent colour field works
and experiments with process. Referring to his approach to installation making
Tillmans said: ‘In the constellations of pictures, I try to approximate the way I see the
world, not in a linear order but as a multitude of parallel experiences… Multiple
singularities, simultaneously accessible as they share the same space or room.’
The Serpentine Gallery exhibition reflects the artist’s acute sensitivity to the
politics of contemporary society, his ongoing fascination with colour, and his
conceptual engagement with the technical processes of photography. These
delicate yet challenging images capture the distinctive energetic balance between
beauty and subversion that Tillmans has long embraced.
Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany. He studied in Great Britain at
the Bournemouth & Poole College of Art & Design, graduating in 1992. In the 1990s,
his work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kunsthalle Zurich;
and Portikus, Frankfurt, amongst others. In 2000 he won the Tate's Turner Prize. A
large survey exhibition in 2001-2003 toured to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Castello di
Rivoli, Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in
Humlebaek, Denmark. His show called Freedom from the Known at P.S.1, New York
(2006) was followed by a major tour of North American museums. In 2008, Tillmans
had an extensive solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin entitled Lighter,
and in 2009 was included in Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Bienniale. More than
twenty monographic books on his work have been published to date and an
exhibition catalogue will accompany the Serpentine Gallery exhibition.
The exhibition will run concurrently with the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010,
designed by Jean Nouvel and opening on 12 July. Housed in the Pavilion will be
artist Christian Boltanski’s Archives des Coeur installation.

For press information, contact:

Tom Coupe, 020 7298 1544, tomc@serpentinegallery.org or
Rose Dempsey, 020 7298 1520, rosed@serpentinegallery.org
Press images at www.serpentinegallery.org/press

Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA

Nearest Tube: South Kensington or Lancaster Gate
Gallery open 10am to 6pm daily. Admission free.