Marais, Paris
Wolfgang Tillmans
Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us
Centre PompidouTickets available at tinyurl.com/8sr9mdsx The Centre Pompidou gives German artist Wolfgang Tillmans free rein to create a unique project to mark the end of the exhibition programme at the centre in Paris. He takes over the 6,000 m2 of level 2 in the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information (Bpi) and transforms the space by means of a curatorial experiment. This installation creates a dialogue between his work and the library space, questioning it both as an architectural structure and as a place for the dissemination of knowledge. The retrospective exhibition explores over thirty-five years of artistic practice across various photographic genres, including portraiture, still life, architecture, documentary images and abstraction. His work is displayed in a wide variety of ways, playing on the verticality of the walls and the horizontality of the tables in a manner which defies any attempt at categorisation. In addition to his photographic work, Tillmans incorporates moving images, music, sound and words into this extensive installation, together with contributions from performance artists. In recent years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been the subject of major retrospectives in leading institutions, notably at Tate Modern in London in 2017 and MoMA in New York in 2022. He also presents a major exhibition entitled ‘Fragile' which toured the African continent (2018–2022 in Kinshasa, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Yaoundé, Accra, Abidjan and Lagos). The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is his first solo exhibition at an institution in Paris since his ambitious installation at the Palais de Tokyo in 2002. The exhibition is complemented by a catalogue and the publication of an expanded version of Tillmans' Reader, which has been translated into French. This book is a collection of writings by and interviews with the artist.