TILLMANS AT THE TATE

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: 2017

6th May 2017. London.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Iguazu, 2010

There are a lot of questions presented in Wolfgang Tillmans' sprawling 14 room show at the Tate Modern, but not a lot of answers. The exhibition, titled simply “2017,” presents Tillman’s work produced since 2003 arranged by theme or sentiment. Moving room to room, the work seeks to disarm, to disabuse. Unsurprisingly for Tillmans', there is a strong political bent. Take his “Truth Study Centre” installations for example— throughout the exhibition, photographs, newspaper clippings, print-outs of online articles, and stark statements like “Now 1980 is as long ago as World War II was in 1980” are displayed on wooden tables under glass. Later, his anti-Brexit posters are shown. We’re constantly reminded of our place in history— what it means to be living in 2017.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Truth Study Centre, Tate, 2017.

The photographs this display are shown with are huge, are intimate. They show us the sublime and revel in the everyday. They nod to the history of art and are intensely contemporary. They play with distance and proximity, mess with scale. There are portraits and landscapes and street photography. The variety of the world is on display, and everything is connected.

Wolfgang Tillmans, Kunstverein, 2007.

Tillmans is clearly asking us to consider our messy and interesting time, but equally too, he is asking us what photography can be. He’s asking how an artist works and what the place of the artist is in society. Early in the exhibition, there’s a room dedicate to intimate images of his studio. Later, there are large scale abstractions, showing the limits of the medium.

There aren’t easy answers, of course. Tillmans’ doesn’t give us any hints about what we can make of our ‘post-truth’ period or how society can turn towards a more positive future. Jumping from place to place, between the extraordinary and the everyday, between abstraction and reality, Tillmans’ shows us our complexities, our disorder, our moments of connection. 

Wolfgang Tillmans, The State We're In, 2015.

Even without answers, even as I felt more confused than when I had arrived at the Tate, I also felt more hopeful. I felt like something must be done and that something could be done. 

You have to believe that the crest of a wave is gathering. And in the corner of the last room, the apple tree outside Tillmans’ studio is coming into bloom. 

“Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017” is on show at Tate Modern until June 11.