b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany; lives and works Berlin, Germany

Wolfgang Tillmans works with photography, video, sound, archival material and images. In a career spanning almost four decades, he has consistently redefined the medium of photography, by pushing the genre to its limits, in terms of material and subject matter. He has achieved this in both form and content and often in the coalescence of both. Tillmans often makes the very process and material of image production the subject of his work; the resulting photographs appearing as large format, abstract consequences of particular techniques and experiments in exposure and printing. Simultaneously, intimately scaled portraits or still lives are a recurring subject he returns to, alongside video and found source imagery. Subject matter, technique, and display strategies are wide-ranging and innovative, resulting in a polymorphous practice of exhibition-making. His inventive approach pairs intimacy and irreverence with a keen sense of social justice. In his inexhaustive commitment to the flattening of hierarchies and openness to meaning making, and his playful indistinction of subject and material, he questions existing values around institutional standards. But this also translates to a larger socio-political impulse. Tillmans’ work lends a poetic curiosity to the most pressing questions of our age and in its infinitude, all of life is addressed in its mission. In a world that is so captured, mediated and told through images, Wolfgang Tillmans invites us to ask how we read them, how they are produced, what role context plays in their understanding and how we might engage critically in the way the visual landscape inscribes us as subjects of our own time.

Recent solo exhibitions include Wolfgang Tillmans: Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait, Public Information Library (BPI), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2025); Wolfgang Tillmans: Summer Storm Rain Drops Freeze Frame, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2024); Wolfgang Tillmans: Moments of Life, Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo, Tokyo (2023); Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2022); Wolfgang Tillmans. Sound is Liquid, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK), Vienna (2021); Wolfgang Tillmans: How does it feel?, WAKO Works of Art, Toyko (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Believers: Artists and the Shakers, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2025); Bodies and Souls, Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris (2025); Dance with Daemons, Fondation Beyeler, Basel/Riehen, Switzerland (2024); 5th Kyiv Biennial, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Berlin, Warsaw, Lublin, Antwerp, and Vienna (2023); A Theatre of Waiting, The Cloud Collection, Nanjing, China (2023); Being In the World, The Tenth Anniversary of the Long Museum, Long Museum, Shanghai (2022); Crip Time, MMK - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2021); Making Space: Recent Photograph Acquisitions, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Meditations in an Emergency, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2020); Silent Water, Galería Mascota, Mexico City (2020).

For further information about this artist please click here.

For Wolfgang Tillmans's entry on Asia Art Archive's website please click here.