ART CITIES: Paris Wolfgang Tillmans

Throughout his career Wolfgang Tillmans has explored the potentials of making pictures and has brought a new kind of subjectivity to photography. He explores traditional genres, such as portraiture, still life, or landscape with a constant interest in the limits of visibility by pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique — thus questioning the existing values and hierarchies.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Centre Pompidou Archive

With a radical openness to form and medium, Wolfgang Tillmans has long questioned how images function in an increasingly saturated visual culture. His practice—spanning photography, video, sound, music, text, and installation—defies categorization, expanding our understanding of what it means to create and present images today. In “Nothing Could Have Prepared – Us Everything Could Have Prepared Us”, Tillmans offers a compelling reflection on nearly four decades of artistic exploration, assembling a vast, interdisciplinary body of work into a single, fluid environment. Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition responds to the unique architecture of Plateau 2 at Centre Pompidou—a space formerly dedicated to the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi). This transformation of a library into an exhibition site is central to Tillmans’ concept. Here, he not only embraces the library’s infrastructure—bookshelves, reading tables, trolleys, and lighting—but reimagines it as a medium in itself, revealing its affinities with his own artistic methods: systems of knowledge, circulation, and shared experience. Tillmans treats the space as both subject and collaborator. His interventions range from minimal to transformative: some areas remain untouched, functioning as ready-mades (such as the reprography room or library shelves), while others are wholly reconfigured—like the conversion of an information point into a raised viewing platform. These gestures invite viewers to navigate the space with heightened awareness, experiencing it not only as a site of exhibition but as a living, spatial archive. The exhibition’s material diversity reflects the full breadth of Tillmans’ oeuvre. Alongside iconic photographs are sound works, video installations, zines, journals, and personal ephemera—many arranged on the very tables once used by library visitors. Some tables are adapted: shortened into benches, mirrored to reflect the ceiling’s exposed pipes, or recontextualized as minimalist sculptures. Each object, each surface, participates in an ongoing conversation between the artist, the institution, and the viewer. Even absence is made visible. Where bookshelves once stood, their weight has left indelible marks in the old purple carpet—a ghostly presence against the newer green-gray flooring. These negative spaces echo the aesthetics of photograms or Tillmans’ “Silver” series, connecting the invisible labor of the archive with the abstract possibilities of the photographic image. In this way, the most utilitarian elements—carpets, tables, fluorescent lighting—become carriers of meaning, texture, and memory. The title “Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us” speaks to this simultaneity of chance and intentionality. The exhibition is both retrospective and speculative; it looks back while remaining fully present in the now. It continues Tillmans’ longstanding interest in the “social fabric”—a phrase he first used in a 1994 photocopy work—to describe not only the spaces we inhabit, but the relationships, systems, and structures that shape how we live, see, and connect. Ultimately, this exhibition is not just a survey of Tillmans’ career, but a total installation—an ecosystem of images, objects, sounds, and situations. It challenges conventional boundaries between public and private, art and information, image and infrastructure. In doing so, Tillmans offers a model for how art can inhabit the world: open-ended, responsive, and deeply attuned to its context.

Photo left: Wolfgang Tillmans, Flowerhead, 2001, Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York. Photo right: Wolfgang Tillmans, My 25 Year Old Cactus, 2023. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

Info: Curator: Florian Ebner, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France, Duration: 13/6-22/9/2025, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 11:00-21:00, www.centrepompidou.fr/