Wolfgang Tillmans: Fold Me

“Tillmans’s work raises a number of questions: Might the mediated image at times be more impactful or enduring than a direct experience of the work? Might it be equally significant, even if different? How to see and how to communicate seeing are at the crux of photography’s capacity to articulate the world in relational terms—decentered, nonhierarchical, open to differences.”

—Roxana Marcoci, curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Wolfgang Tillmans

Fold Me, 2022

A fold is an encounter of the inside and the out, a change of direction leaving a physical impression. In his work, Tillmans invites an interplay of chance and control, of consideration and coincidence, of process and time. He folds the world back onto paper. At a time when image-making technology is accelerating into an unknown new, Tillmans’s pictures in Fold Me calmly rely on the photographic translation/recording of the act of seeing: from eye to paper via the analog use of the digital camera.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Faltenwurf, Up, 2022

The fold has been a recurring visual trope in Tillmans’s work since the 1990s, when he made his first Faltenwurf (Drapery) images. He developed the theme further in his paper drop and Lighter works, formalizing the fold as a concept that articulates the materiality of photography. This exhibition features five recent works from the Lighter series.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Lighter, white / pink and Lighter 116, 2020-2023

“Tillmans displays a true fascination for paper—as a material as well as a subject.… His predilection for this material is fully inscribed in his exploration of the tension between two- and three-dimensionality: paper is a priori flat, yet a good deal of the artist’s work consists in giving it volume again.”

—Clément Chéroux, director, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris

Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fold Me, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

Wolfgang Tillmans

Office Paper For Food Wrapping Recycling, Addis Ababa, 2019

Tillmans has long been interested in Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monad, which sees folds and foldings as “not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.” For the artist, the fold collapses linear delineations and boundaries of separation, for instance between image and its carrier, and opens up the potential for reimagining the curvature of space.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Lennartz Factory Washroom, 2023

“There is something ludic in Tillmans’s installations; he obviously has great fun in mounting them. But their most important aspect is that we are invited to play as well: we are summoned to draw links, to imagine connections, whether formal or semantic, to build narratives out of the pieces in front of us, as if they were a hand of cards.”

—Yve-Alain Bois, professor and art historian

Wolfgang Tillmans

Provo, Utah and the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains, 2023

Provo, Utah and the Wasatch Range of the Rocky Mountains (2023) and Lunar Landscape (2022) take the folds of Earth’s surface as their subject. The stark contrast between a flat urban landscape that encounters a mountain range and the effect of the full moon reflecting on the innumerable curves of the Atlantic’s surface results in almost diametrically opposite interpretations of landscapes, presented here as fragments of a larger whole that escapes containment.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Lunar Landscape, 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans

Watering, a, 2022

Tillmans’s examination of water in its different states punctuates the exhibition. Watering, a (2022) is a carefully composed still life that Tillmans made in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The image depicts bottle caps that appear to hover in midair, resting on the top segment of transparent plastic bottles alongside a water sachet—the most widely available form of safe drinking water in West Africa. In Power Station (Low Clouds) (2023) a plume of water vapor from a power station silently traverses a layer of low clouds, casting a shadow. The elegance of vapor on top of vapor can only disguise the messiness of our hunger for energy so much.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Power Station (Low Clouds), 2023

Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fold Me, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

“[Tillmans] changes the status of these images from ephemeral and unremarkable to more enduring and worthy of contemplation, and through this contemplation he invites and enables a consideration of their political dimensions and the ramifications of transforming them into visual elements in a work of art.”

—Sophie Hackett, curator, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Wolfgang Tillmans

Window Framed Trees, 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans

Lagos still life II, 2022

Still lifes are an integral part of Tillmans's oeuvre. Rain Splashed Painted Life (2022) is a carefully composed still life that Tillmans made in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. At first suggesting a romantic landscape of a horizon at dusk, the image reveals itself to be a close-up view of a mud-splattered wall with weeds growing in front of it. The wall itself, painted olive green, reveals in the upper part of the frame a white painted edge, creating the effect of the work’s border bleeding into the image.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Rain Splashed Painted Life, 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans

Sun Line, 2023

“Tillmans’s still life photography eludes any hierarchical portrayals of the quotidian, harmonizing matter-of-fact materials (like bubble wrap) with romance (like dried flowers). The margins and the middle collide, but more than that they are in concert. But more than that, they are unsolvable. And isn’t that the point?”

—Durga Chew-Bose, writer

Wolfgang Tillmans

Sweat It Out Ceiling, 2022

Sweat It Out Ceiling (2022) forms a part of an ongoing series of nightlife pictures which present underground club venues frequented by the artist. Conscious of the implicit connection between nightlife and broader political issues, Tillmans considers these clubs as sanctuaries for free expression and even protest, offering a subtle counterpoint to the flood of uniform party pictures that now clutter social media.

Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fold Me, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

The exhibition’s focus on inanimate subjects is juxtaposed with the inclusion of new portraits. These portraits attest to Tillmans’s ongoing investigation of what it means to depict a person. His portraits are at times long planned and at other times the result of unexpected interactions or in-the-moment encounters. Each of these portraits speaks of a distinct moment in history, and the relationship that each of these subjects maintains with their present.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Matthew Blaise, 2022

“Tillmans’s portraits are fleeting and poetic, yet also studied and deliberate. Attentive to the most minute aspects of his subjects’ expressions, he makes stirring images of charged social encounters. Through his lens these subjects are deeply vulnerable and decidedly unheroic, the product of a deliberate formal disposition.”

—Oluremi C. Onabanjo, associate curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Wolfgang Tillmans

Anita Esfandiari, 2015

Wolfgang Tillmans

Elternbesuch, 2022

“My work is informed and sustained by acknowledging and enduring the extremely low probability of making a good picture. That does not mean that everything is coincidence, or that my work is the result of amassing and selecting images. It is an experimental arrangement of sensitivities that I have built over a long time, with different modes of observation and a continuous fine-tuning that lead to the images that make up my work.”

—Wolfgang Tillmans

Installation view, Wolfgang Tillmans: Fold Me, David Zwirner, New York, 2023

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