What an unusual Wolfgang Tillmans this is, coming up for sale in October 2025 at Bernaerts in Antwerp.
It’s listed with a title, Fragile, 2018, which was the artist’s first artist alias when he was a teenager. But is described as an exhibition poster for Tillmans’ show of the same name, organized by ifa and the Goethe Institute, which toured Africa. The dates and venues are for the first stop, at the MACM in Kinshasa, DRC.
Which is all fine, except this is obviously an overprint of two of Tillmans’ most iconic pictures, Deer Hirsch (1995) and Dan (2008), with printer calibration marks and file names all around the border. If this is a printer proof, what is it proofing? Does Tillmans have a body of double-printed work? Given his propensity to print things, I’d be shocked if he didn’t.
[And what do you know, he does? Double Concorde, 129 unique double-printed offset works, published by the Fondation Beyeler at the exact moment in Fall 2017 he was overprinting this poster.]
Anyway, what’s wilder is that it’s signed, and apparently numbered 51/300? It is definitely the case that the tabloid-style publication for Fragile included several fold-out posters. But this is not that. Was there really a signed poster edition for Kinshasa, and are the other 299 really all hiding offline all this time? Or was this some kind of one-off, which Tillmans signed to approve the colors, like that one epic Richter color proof?
To add some uncertainty, the Invaluable listing for the poster includes its signed and numbered info, while Bernaerts’ own website does not. [update it does now.] Perhaps it was updated to remove the suggestion that there are more of these wild, 2-for-1 Tillmanses out there.
9 Oct 2025, Lot 1385, Wolfgang Tillmans, Fragile, 2018, est. EUR 600-800 [update: I think it sold for EUR400][bernaerts.eu]