Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans explodes hierarchies at Regen Projects

“Do you mind if I smoke?” asks German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans with fun throughout a latest video name from his house in Berlin.

As he lights his cigarette, he appears to be like each bit the renegade artist he’s recognized for being. At 57, Tillmans is within the midst of staging his tenth exhibition in Los Angeles because the mid-Nineties at Regen Projects. He is likely one of the most celebrated photographers of his period, with a observe that collapses the gap between high quality artwork and the heartbeat of avenue tradition, spanning epic abstractions and the acquainted textures of latest life.

At the identical time, Tillmans has one other life as a severe digital musician, recording a sequence of experimental albums, together with his most up-to-date, 2021’s “Build From Here.” He is deeply related to the music world, and photographed the duvet for Frank Ocean’s acclaimed “Blonde,” making him a uncommon artist to be in main museums whereas genuinely engaged with in style music and the membership scene — a little bit of a rock star in his personal proper.

The official opening of his Regen present, “Keep Movin’,” attracted a line that wrapped across the constructing. Fans are drawn to his diversified strands of labor, which transfer instinctively between disparate approaches and subject material, from well-known faces to pictures delicate to gentle and form, in topics so simple as the curve of paper folded softly over itself.

A safety guard, proper, stands close to the work “Robin Fischer, Dirostahl, Remscheid 2024” in German-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ present exhibition, “Keep Movin’,” at Regen Projects.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

During an early walk-through for just a few dozen invited company, Tillmans held forth on his private cosmos, surveying footage from the experimental to the deeply intimate. Portraits, politically charged tabletop collages and quiet images that seize the easy vibrance of each day life are strewn throughout Regen’s 20,000 sq. ft of gallery area.

“I see my work evolve more in evolutions, rather than in revolutions,” Tillmans stated, gesturing to a conceptual wall-sized picture created with a photocopier.

His Regen present, by March 1, additionally options brief video works and the abstractions of camera-less photographs he considers “pure photography,” created within the darkroom by shining gentle instantly onto photosensitive paper. There are footage regarding human sexuality and pictures from nature. Each topic and method is an ongoing concern left deliberately open-ended, and by no means contained inside a single challenge, title or grouping. They are all inseparable in his personal thoughts, free from classes or a finite sequence of images.

“I am aware that these art historical categories exist in my oeuvre, but I’m not seeking them out,” Tillmans defined after the walk-through. His observe shouldn’t be about “working through one series or genre and then moving on to another.”

Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Keep Movin’” at Regen Projects.

(Evan Bedford / Regen Projects)

On his journey to Los Angeles, Tillmans made a long-planned go to to the Mt. Wilson Observatory to fulfill his lifelong curiosity in astronomy. He used the large telescope to seize the twinkling of Sirius, the brightest star within the evening sky. This preoccupation resurfaces at Regen in a large-scale print of 2023’s “Flight Honolulu to Guam,” revealing a star subject above the clouds.

Tillmans’ curiosity in stargazing goes again to his adolescence, and pictures of the moon and cosmos recur in his work. “It gave me a sense of not being lonely, seeing the infinite sky and universe,” he says. “I always felt it was a very grounding experience that all humans share. I always got something from this — besides the beauty and the formal marvel of it all — this sense of location and locating myself.”

His depiction of the heavens is only one of many threads and themes that run by his a long time of labor.

A chunk of labor personally hung by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in his present exhibition, “Keep Movin’” at Regen Projects.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Early in his profession, Tillmans started taking pictures for the British avenue type journal i-D, creating portraits of the well-known and unfamous, whereas additionally documenting membership life and homosexual tradition. In 1995, Taschen revealed his first e-book, which made a stir with portraits of soppy, oblique illumination, emphasizing naturalness. By avoiding the dramatic lighting and exaggerated particular results typically seen in footage of youth tradition, he landed on a particular visible type.

“I felt the heaviness of life and the joy of life,” Tillmans says. “I saw myself as a multifaceted complex being, not just as young. So I experimented with lighting and film — how can I photograph my contemporaries in a way that approximates the way that I see through my eyes? And that was stripping back anything effectful, almost taking away the camera.”

He continues to do project work for magazines, which he considers a part of his inventive observe. Several latest portraits are at Regen, together with a foundry employee in Tillmans’ hometown of Remscheid and one other of actor Jodie Foster. The editorial work brings him into contact with individuals and locations he won’t in any other case meet.

In 2000 Tillmans turned the primary photographer and first non-British artist to win the distinguished Turner Award. Tate Britain staged his mid-career retrospective in 2003 and the Hammer Museum in Westwood mounted his first main U.S. retrospective that very same 12 months, which traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Coming after main retrospectives on the Pompidou Centre in Paris final 12 months and the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 2022, the Regen present dispenses with the retrospective body whereas quietly performing an analogous process — taking in the principle currents of Tillmans’ work over the previous 20 years, and some photographs relationship to the late ‘80s. His relationship with the gallery began with his first Los Angeles exhibition.

Visitors walk through photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition, “Keep Movin’,” at Regen Projects in Los Angeles.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As ever, the pictures are displayed in a startling vary of styles and sizes: framed and unframed, enormous wall-size prints cling alongside tiny, snapshot-scale footage. One of the biggest, “Panorama, left” (2006), spans practically 20 ft and hangs solely from bulldog clips. Smaller footage are merely taped to the wall, however nothing is supposed to point hierarchy.

“The biggest may not be the most important, and the smallest might be overlooked,” he explains. “It’s a little bit like projecting the way that I look at the world.”

In his first decade of exhibitions, he had no frames in any respect. “I taped those photographs to the wall, not as a gesture of disrespectful grunginess, but as a gesture of purity,” he provides. “That sense of immediacy — and not imbuing something with outside signifiers of value — lets the fragile piece of paper speak for itself.”

One of the present present’s bigger conceptual items, “Memorial for the Victims of Organized Religion II,” fills a nook with 48 rectangular portrait-sized images, all of them strong black or darkish blue. It’s a near-replica of a piece proven on the Pompidou with the identical solemn title, created to acknowledge these “physically maimed or mentally harmed” by doctrine and intolerance.

“I myself have a spiritual side,” says Tillmans, nonetheless grateful for optimistic experiences attending a Lutheran church in his youth. “But over the years I’ve become ever more distrustful of organized religions and seeing the role of religion in government. I find it incredibly immodest for humans to tell other humans what God wants.”

When he’s not exploring his spirituality and creativity visually, he focuses his power on the music world. It’s a pure setting for Tillmans, who’s more and more energetic releasing his personal electronic-based pop music. He’s often labored as a DJ, and has been concerned in acid home, techno and different digital music. Despite his notoriety within the artwork world, he has no concern about hitting the charts.

“This is part of my work. I’m doing it the same way that I’m doing a photograph. I’m not doing a photograph to be peak popular in two months’ time,” Tillmans stated. “It’s there and it’s still there in 24 years.”