Wolfgang Tillmans. Saturated Light

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorialworlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out andcompellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographicprocesses. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book,Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable,exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to thepictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibitionsettings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, theVenice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

An essay by art theorist Tom Holert discusses the philosophical, aesthetic,and material questions that Tillmans’s Silver pose on the one hand, while onthe other hand the thought-provoking pictorial process itself sets in theroom. A conversation between the artist and photo engineer Klaus Pollmeierdelves into the innumerable photo-technical details, observations, andintentional as well as unintentional accidents that are at work in the photographs.