Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans, Rien ne nous y préparait. Tout nous y préparait
Curated by Florian Ebner, with Olga Frydryszak-Rétat and Matthias Pfaller
Public Information Library, Centre Pompidou
Until 22 September 2025

In Paris, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans transforms the 6,000 m² of the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI), emptied of its books, into a grand theatre of images. The artist invites visitors to enter his world by immersing themselves in forty years of artistic creation, which he brings into dialogue with the architecture of the Centre Pompidou just before its extended closure until 2030. ” Nothing prepared us for it – Everything prepared us for it”, the manifesto title, is proclaimed with a shrug of the shoulders in the face of the collapse of a world that, from the Berlin raves of the 1990s to the geopolitical fractures of this troubled decade, has never ceased to whisper its agony. Tillmans is an alchemist of the mundane, an archivist of the little things. He takes over this public library, ‘wildly democratic’ in his own words, to deploy an organised chaos, a sprawling fresco in which the intimate and the cosmic, the trivial and the sublime, come together to signify the urgency of looking before everything fades away. Tillmans’ images are arranged in micro-visual events that demand a pause and a shift in the gaze, an art of the ‘in-between’, between documentary and abstraction, intimacy and manifesto. The journey he stages plays on densities. Some rooms offer a profusion of small prints, hung without any apparent hierarchy, like notes taken throughout a lifetime, while others prolong the freeze frame with large, luminous prints that compel contemplation. This back-and-forth undoubtedly reflects his constant alternation between the ephemeral and the lasting, between direct recording and the transformation of photographic material. 

What is striking about Wolfgang Tillmans, and what the exhibition highlights, is his attention to surface. His images are not only windows on the world but also objects that bear the traces of their manufacture. The velvety finish, the tension of the paper, the shimmer of the colours—all of this functions as a form of tactile writing. The chromatic abstractions, often produced by direct manipulation of the paper or the print, bring photography closer to painting without denying its chemical and optical specificity. Where some artists seek to blur the medium behind a concept, Tillmans makes it legible and palpable. The abstract series ‘Freischwimmer’, for example, is based on experiments that arise without a camera in the darkroom, between chance and the manipulation of the exposure of the photographic paper. The fascinating and monumental impression of colour gives them a picturesque appearance. The image structures here are created exclusively with light, which Tillmans moves with his hands. No chemicals are involved in the process. The delicate, almost black drawings in the image, which condense and dissolve like clouds here in the overwhelming green in some places, there in the intense pink, seem to show the flow of light itself. The coexistence of snapshots taken in a hurry, whether club images or candid portraits, and more posed images such as landscapes, nudes or still lifes, testifies to a practice in which personal archives dialogue with formal research. This porosity between document and experimentation gives the body of work a tone in which emotion and reflection respond to each other. 

All of Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is imbued with a constant preoccupation with the body and the gaze. His portraits, often close-up, sometimes frontally nude, are in no way exhibitionist. They seek the truth of a presence, the depth of a shared moment. The exhibition makes palpable this ethic of portraiture in which vulnerability is not exploited but acknowledged. The captured gazes, sometimes distracted, sometimes defiant, sometimes gentle, trace a map of human relationships, bringing the political into the private sphere. The artist never shies away from the socio-political dimension. His images of demonstrations and his visible stances in certain series remind us that in this age of image-commodity, photography remains an instrument of testimony and mobilisation. At the BPI, this balance is finely calibrated. Commitment never stifles the sensuality of the images, and personal sensitivity never weakens their critical impact. 

The exhibition at the BPI confirms Wolfgang Tillmans’ central place in contemporary photography. He will remain, in the history of the medium, one of the best of his generation, the one who reintroduced fragility and subjectivity into a photography too often dominated by the imperatives of spectacle. His practice reflects a complex lineage, from the intimate photography of the 1970s and 1980s, from Arlene Gottfried to Nan Goldin, to the club culture of the 1990s, via a keen awareness of contemporary political issues, while remaining singularly modern in his way of tinkering with processes and formats. At the BPI, it takes the form of a dialogue with the public. This is undoubtedly the exhibition’s most notable success. By avoiding overly demonstrative gestures and rejecting institutional grandiloquence, the presentation allows the images to breathe and does justice to their ambiguity. One leaves the exhibition with the feeling of having attended a lesson in photographic modesty: the ability of the image to say without imposing, to show without simplifying. While it is difficult to encapsulate such a multifaceted body of work in a single formula, the exhibition at the BPI offers a dense and stimulating reading of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans who, as he has done since the 1990s, intervenes in space to better reinvent the way photography is exhibited. His images come together in the present like fragments of a lived history. Rien ne nous y préparait. Tout nous y préparait reveals an artist who has not succumbed to stylistic ease and who continues, through the precision of his formal solutions and the sincerity of his gaze, to renew the contemporary photographic vocabulary by offering a different way of looking. 

Head image : Exhibition view Rien ne nous y préparait. Tout nous y préparait, Wolfgang Tillmans, curated by Florian Ebner, avec Olga Frydryszak-Rétat et Matthias Pfaller, Public Information Library, Centre Pompidou, until 22 September 2025.

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