1980年代から現在に至るまで、MoMAの調査はアーティストの制作活動を網羅し、象徴的な写真と、これまであまり目にすることのなかった重要な作品群を紹介する予定です。ナイトライフの恍惚としたイメージからカメラなしの抽象画、繊細なポートレートから建築的研究、社会運動の記録から窓辺の静物、天体現象から親密なヌードまで、ティルマンスは想像しうるあらゆるジャンルの写真を探求し、いかに写真を意味のあるものにするかを常に試してきました。

「To look without fear」では、これらの作品群を展示し、壁に正確に貼られた額縁なしのプリントから、テーブルの上にコピー、ビデオプロジェクション、雑誌のページなどの、まとめられたイメージ群までに、ティルマンスの独特の展示方法を反映させます。「私のインスタレーションは、私の見方、私が環境を認識する方法、あるいは認識したい方法の反映だと考えています」とティルマンスは述べています。「それらは常に私が生きたいと思う世界でもあるのです」 彼の作品の物理的な表現へのこのような配慮は、写真というメディアの詩的な可能性に対する長年の研究から生まれたものです。

以下の写真はクリックで拡大します

以下、リリーステキストです。

The Museum of Modern Art will present Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear, the artist’s first museum survey in New York, from
September 12, 2022 through January 1, 2023, in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Unique groupings of approximately 350 of Tillmans’s photographs, videos, and multimedia installations will be displayed according to a loose chronology
throughout the Museum’s sixth floor. Informed by new scholarship and eight years of dialogue with the artist, the exhibition will highlight how Tillmans’s profoundly inventive, philosophical, and creative approach is both informed by and designed to highlight the social and political causes for which he has been an advocate throughout his career. Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear is organized by Roxana Marcoci, the newly-named David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography, with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, and Phil Taylor, former Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.

From the outset of his career, Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Germany) has revolutionized the prevailing conventions of photographic presentation, making connections between his pictures in response to a given context and activating the space of the exhibition by hanging photographs in a corner, above a doorframe, on a free-standing column, or next to a fire extinguisher. In developing his own language for these overall installations, Tillmans’s practice verges into a sculptural dimension. The decisive logic of his practice is a visual democracy, best summarized by his phrase “If one thing matters, everything matters.”

Tillmans considers the role of the artist to be, among other things, that of “an amplifier” for social awareness. His approach to making pictures foregrounds the ideas of human connections and togetherness, with his work reflecting a deep care for his
subjects. Tillmans has pictured survival and loss amid the AIDS crisis, mined the media’s aestheticization of military forces, given voice to LGBTQ+ communities around the world, and tracked the diffusion of globalism—and, in so doing, contested claims to absolute truth.

“Tillmans’s value system revolves around some central questions,” said Marcoci. “What can pictures make visible? What can one know at all? Who deserves attention? How can one connect with other people? How might we foster solidarity? In what do art’s political potential and ethical worth reside?”

Spanning the artist’s production from the 1980s to the present, MoMA’s survey will present iconic photographs alongside his rarely seen significant bodies of work. From ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, Tillmans has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make pictures meaningful.

To look without fear will present these bodies of work and reflect Tillmans’s distinct strategies of display—from unframed prints taped precisely to the wall to constellations of images grouped on tabletops as photocopies, video projections, and magazine pages. “I see my installations as a reflection of the way I see, the way I perceive or want to perceive my environment,” Tillmans has said. “They’re also always a world that I want to live in.” Such attention to the physical manifestation of his work extends from a longstanding investigation of the poetic possibilities of the photographic medium.