![]() ![]() Wolfgang Tillmans, Thuy in make-up room, 1993, medium and dimensions variable.īut these images are exceptional. Alex black ink free#Polish people travelled Saturday night through East Germany to sell whatever they could Sunday morning.” 1 A feeling of desperation pervades the bazaar it is a site of necessity and precarity, and as such offers a riposte to the West’s promise of a free market. Tillmans, who was just twenty-one at the time, describes items “so poor or used or cheap that it was a blurry border between what is a commodity and what is just dirt and trash on the ground. (Tillmans first exhibited these works in 2005 in Berlin.) Large groups of people stand outdoors bartering over meager things, a sausage laid on the ground over a sheet of crumpled paper, a folded shirt, a mug, a toy motorcycle. ![]() Alex black ink series#Rather than heroic pictures of sledgehammers smashing the graffitied wall, Tillmans offers quotidian events, including a series of photographs, taken in 1989, depicting transactions at the open-air Polish Market in East Berlin. ![]() These big geopolitical changes show up in small, casual ways in Tillmans’s work. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 led not only to the reunification of Germany but also to a larger promise of togetherness: The Soviet Union collapsed under the pressures of glasnost and perestroika soon after, and suddenly global tensions (i.e., the Cold War) promised to diminish. The artist’s career-currently the subject of “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York-corresponds to a time of new connections and movements in Europe. Wolfgang Tillmans, Markt, g, 1989, medium and dimensions variable. But by leveraging photography’s many lives (as art, as document, as fashion editorial, as reportage, and as publicity), Tillmans has been able to thread the needle through an increasingly vast network of image production, and its sites of display, in order to create a new kind of image-a moving image not simply in the affective sense, but in the circulatory one, too. The task of imaging has largely been left to the stylist, the executive, and the influencer. I know this is a big claim to make about an artist, given that the profession today no longer has much to do with the way things look. And yet he has created images-indeed, icons-that are somehow correlates for them, that use these things as scaffolding. These keywords are both the technologies and the coordinates of Tillmans’s practice, the atmosphere and infrastructure that support his work, though they are not necessarily visible in his pictures. Not the Colosseum or the Arc de Triomphe or even the Eiffel Tower, but easyJet, English, Berghain. WOLFGANG TILLMANS HAS CREATED an image of contemporary Europe that a lot of people carry around in their heads. Wolfgang Tillmans, Markt, a, 1989, medium and dimensions variable. ![]()
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