Wolfgang Tillmans Pompidou exhibition poster, 60 x 40 cm, selling to benefit Between Bridges
Wolfgang Tillmans is selling the remaining posters from his Pompidou exhibition to benefit Between Bridges, his foundation in Berlin that promotes democracy, intercultural dialogue, art, and LGBTQIA+ rights.
I saw it on insta where, Tillmans reports, he can’t mention the name of his foundation because the platform will throttle his post because it reads as advertising, which they want him to pay for.
The posters ship from Europe, which is a phrase that a year ago would have been so normal you wouldn’t even notice it, and now, as I type this, I don’t even know if it’s possible or tariff-throttled.
So I’m gonna buy a poster from an artist I like which I saw on the internet, to support democracy and queer rights, because that is now a revolutionary provocation, apparently. Maybe I should have gotten the Frank Ocean one.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Chisenhale Edition, 2011, laser print floated in custom box, ed. 44/100+50AP? I can’t tell via 100 Artists for Gaza
100 Artists For Gaza has launched an online auction to raise money to support Médecins san Frontieres’ activities in Gaza. Most of the work is small and, so far, very affordable.
Wolfgang Tillmans, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, inkjet, 205 x 135 cm, also a 24 x 20 in. edition.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, was vandalized during an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2007, but the first mention I can find of the attack wasn’t until 2011, when Tillmans gave a lecture at the Royal Academy:
This photograph (The Cock (Kiss), 2002) of two guys kissing got slashed by a visitor at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington. I’m always aware that one should never take things for granted, never take liberties for granted. For hundreds and hundreds of years this was not normal, not acceptable, and this term of acceptable is really what I connect beauty to. So, sometimes I’m said to be turning everyday subject matter into beautiful things, and I find that a bit uncritical, unless it is connected to that beauty is of course always political, as in it describes what is acceptable or desirable in society. That is never fixed, and always needs reaffirming and defending.
The attack on The Cock (Kiss) has become part of the picture’s lore, repeatedwell beyond Tillmans’ own mentions. The image was shared widely online as a defiant response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub murders, something Tillmans’ publisher Phaidon wrote about within days of the shootings. In 2022 writer Douglas Stuart spoke with Tillmans about the photo, and the attack:
TILLMANS: I put it in my first American museum survey exhibition that toured from Chicago to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where the picture was attacked, slashed by somebody with a key, ripped. It came as a shock. But I’ve always been struck by the fact that you can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television, but you can’t show two men kissing each other.
STUART: Certainly, it’s an image that has been a call for solidarity and defiance in the queer community. It was an image that was actually so central to the writing of my book.
Stuart took inspiration from one of the The Cock (Kiss) kissers for a character in his YA novel, Young Mungo, both as a sweaty symbol of gay liberation and as an object of homophobic attack.
When homophobia seemed resurgent this past summer, the Smithsonian was being newly threatened, and beautiful things again needed defending, Tillmans mentioned the incident on Instagram. He said it was slashed, and removed from the show. I realized that though I’d seen the show multiple times, written about it, and even partied with Tillmans and the curators after the opening, I’d heard nothing at the time about the slashing, and remembered no public reporting on it, or even on the removal of a prominent work. Indeed, it seems it was never made public until Tillmans made it public.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which co-organized the Hirshhorn’s Tillmans show with the Hammer Museum, owns an edition of The Cock (Kiss). Was it the one attacked? There’s only an edition of 3+ 1AP. Is one lost? I wanted to look more closely into the attack, and the museum’s response to it. So I went into the exhibition files in the Smithsonian Archives.
I still remember standing in front of Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde Grid as Andrea Rosen sold the last complete set to some art adviser from Paris who’d started talking to her before I did, and I was offered a few loosies, at unbundled prices. I got the book instead. But now I wonder if I should just YOLO it and make some.
While researching something else in the Hirshhorn’s archives recently, I stumbled across the museum staff’s correspondence with Tillmans and his gallerists about their acquisition of a Concorde Grid edition in 2006.
Actually, it was about designing the lighting for the Hirshhorn’s 2007 Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, because conservators stipulated a lower light level than the artist wanted, in order to protect the museum’s new acquisition. But no worries, it turns out Tillmans had also provided an exhibition copy in addition to the “original,” 10-year-old C-prints, so just go ahead and turn up the lights, blast those suckers!
“[Tillmans] feels that implicit in the terms of the acquisition was the idea that the exhibition copy could be shown at light levels that he prefers to show his work,” wrote a curator to a conservator.
Which reminds me of something I’d heard Tillmans say before, that collectors of his unframed prints get the media file and a certificate of authenticity, and are able to reprint it as needed. He was talking about his large-scale prints, but I wonder if that applies for his smaller unframed works, too? Or maybe just to Concorde Grid, because it’s at once both large and small? Actually, re-reading this now, reprinting requires the destruction and return of the original print, so this is actually handled differently from an exhibition print. Also, MoMA stipulates two identical color prints whenever a work enters their collection, so maybe it’s nbd after all. nvm
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.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Double Concorde Unique, offset print, 24.5 x 20.5 cm, no 12 of 129, sold at Lempertz
[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.
in le ciel comme écran #1 on 16 Sept, Tillmans and Joël Vacheron discuss the artist’s astronomy and sky photography;
in l’ère de la post-vérité on 20 Sept, Tillmans and two French political scientist philosophers, Asma Mhalla and Yves Citton talk about post-truth public opinion digital technologies social networks emotion tbqh, idek.
And the next day, 21 Sept., in le Musée à venir / The Museum to come, Tillmans and Mark Wigley talk about the transformation of cultural institutions.
It does not look like any of these talks will be streamed, and no indication yet they’ll be archived. And the second one sounds like a million talking head shows on France 2. But honestly, it’s one of those mornings where you wake up and just look for any excuse to yeet yourself tf out of here.
Wolfgang TIlllmans, Moon in Earthlight, 2015, image via centrepompidou.fr
I think I’ve always liked that Wolfgang Tillmans remembers his photocopying roots more than any particular photocopy image I’ve seen. But there was an interesting, early photocopy work in his Pompidou exhibition: a guy’s head printed on multiple, tiled sheets. Making it seemed more concerted than the typical photocopied work might otherwise seem. But it also stuck because Tillmans included the source photo elsewhere in the show, in a spread from a 2015 Arena HOMME+ magazine feature.
But it turns out the most unexpected photocopy content was elsewhere: in the old BPI’s copy room. Tillmans kept it intact and functioning, stocking it with things for viewers to copy. That meant laminated texts and newspapers, mostly, but no Tillmans imagery.
So I assumed the charge was to make our own Tillmanses, not copy his. I started by holding my laminated poster slightly off the glass, and leaving the lid open. As I made adjustments for a second pass, an attendant came to tell me this would use too much toner, and I needed to put the sheet flat on the glass.
Taizé in the bibliothéque
And I needed to close the lid. Those were the rules. The rules were posted right there on the wall, I noted, and said nothing about either thing. He replied, well I’m here saying it, and I couldn’t disagree with that. At that moment, he broke off when he noticed a group of people starting to copy their faces. In the interim someone had started using my copier, so I yeeted myself out of the anarchy I’d contributed to. Had this been a copy room in a 6,000 sqm. Sigmar Polke exhibition, I thought, things would definitely have been set up differently.
I only realized as I was leaving that there were large, Pompidou envelopes, and a stamp. But in my hasty yeeting, I ended up stamping only my envelope, not my resulting prints. So I guess this post will have to serve as documentation for the works.
The first image, which only managed to capture my thumb, was the most visually dense of the laminated posters, which were mostly slogans. It was a French quote, unsourced but presumably Tillmans, about how Bronski Beat recorded “Smalltown Boy” 16 years after Jimi Hendrix covered “All Along the Watchtower” in 1968, and in 1998, Cher recorded “Do You Believe” 14 years after “Smalltown Boy.” I cannot find the original quote.
The three posters then acquired their important facture by spending two weeks at the bottom of a duffel bag.
After decades of tearing down medium-specific silos I’m not going to start rebuilding them now. And it’s entirely reasonable to look at Wolfgang Tillmans’ wide range of print formats and say that he has always been exceptionally aware of making shows that are also installations, and images that are also objects.
But by the time I made my way through Tillmans’ massive, catalogue raisonné-scale show that fills the Pompidou’s 6,000 m2 library, the pictures all felt familiar. The music, I love that for him. What I wanted to know more about are Tillman’s sculptures—and his painting.
A couple of pieces are both, though: like Wolfgang Tillmans’ 1995 photo of König’s bookshelf, which looks monumental, more like a Gursky than the Gurskys, but also offhand and intimate, like a Tillmans.
Of course, the most early and most iconic work has to be On Kawara’s date painting from 1967. König’s early and unflagging enthusiasm for Kawara’s conceptual projects was instrumental to their acclaim. And that support manifests in another Today Series painting, 21 Nov. 2003, which was a gift from the artist for König’s 60th birthday.
Which, how does that work? I mean, I’m sure everyone shopping for a Date Painting quietly gravitates to a date that means something to them. But this is the opposite. Are König’s birthday and the moon landing the only two events explicitly commemorated by Date Paintings?
Wolfgang TIllmans, Regina, 2002, ed. 1/1+1AP, inkjet on paper, 137 x 206cm, sold for GBP68750 at Christie’s London during Frieze Week 2018
The last time the Queen of England rode around London in the Gold State Coach was for her 50th anniversary, and Wolfgang Tillmans was there.
Halberds out: Study for Tillmans Regina, 115 x 206 cm, 2022, sky news screencap, which, alas, does not include the giant
If he was there today to see the Queen’s subjects waving at a hologram of her riding in the GSC, it might look a little something like this. Protip: the way you can tell my Tillmans from Tillmans’ Tillmans is the aspect ratio.
Study for SCREEN COVERAGE…, 2022, it’s a diptych
And while mine will ship with a separate SCREEN COVERAGE WILL CONTINUE AFTER THE HORSES HAVE SAFELY PASSED BY monochrome, I feel like Wolfgang would have been able to get both screens in one shot.
Wolfgang TIllmans, Regina, 2002, 136.6 x 206.4cm, ed. 1/1+1AP, est. GBP30-50000, Christie’s London during Frieze Week
I am a bigger fan of Wolfgang Tillmans than of the British royal family, but this is a truly excellent image, and I would definitely like to see it IRL, preferably pinned on my wall. It’ll be sold at Christie’s during Frieze Week.
As a 1/1 acquired directly from the artist, and with no exhibition history, I’d imagine this print has an interesting story of its own.
If I don’t scare up an extraneous GBP 50,000 by next month, perhaps a Shanzhai Tillmans series is in order. Of course, unlike a Shanzhai Gursky, I’m not sure what the difference between a Tillmans and a Shanzhai Tillmans would even be.
Wolfgang Tillmans is worried about the impending vote for the UK to remain in the EU. So he and his studio assistants created a set of posters to encourage people to stay in, and especially to vote, and to register to vote. UK voting registration must be completed by June 7.
After they were released yesterday, I tried to find a printer in the US who could easily handle an A1 (33×24 in, roughly) size. So far, nothing. I need to print them out before the vote, though; if it goes awry, I don’t think I’ll have the heart to make a memorial set.
I also tried to find anyplace that can confirm that Wolfgang’s parents are Polish and Spanish. He grew up in Germany, and I always understood he was German-in-London.
There are a couple of atmospheric landscapes, and some of the posters are now-classic Tillmans abstraction, but most of them are straight-up text, a new direction for Tillmans’ practice. Text are images, though, so it’s really not that far afield. The most intriguing poster for me is #24. It’s completely blank.
It’s probably the one that most closely mirrors my feelings about the EU’s right-wing turn lately; I just haven’t known what to say. And it boggles my mind that the Britain and Europe of my generation are creating such an existential crisis for themselves. Read Wolfgang Tillmans’ letter and download and circulate the posters [tillmans.co.uk] UPDATE: So I emailed Wolfgang’s studio to find out the story behind the blank poster, and the next day they replaced the pdf file. The new poster bundle includes two new posters, and the monochrome is gone. So now we know. And that original 4.21 pdf is vintage/collectible.
